10 Amazing Songs Written Out Of Competition

Not many bands are really able to recover from hard times quite like Green Day did. After their original album Cigarettes and Valentines was folded after the master tapes went missing, Billie Joe Armstrong ended up reigniting the pop punk fire on American Idiot, which became a scathing protest record against the Bush administration. Even though it was a watershed moment then, the original rock opera tendencies were actually written out of boredom.

When both Armstrong and drummer Tre Cool were out of the studio one day, bassist Mike Dirnt started to fiddle around with a guitar before coming up with a snippet of a song called Nobody Likes You. Immediately inspired, both Armstrong and Cool tried to come up with their own bite sized songs to try and outdo each other. Once they came up for the air though, they had strung all of these ideas into what would eventually become the penultimate track Homecoming.

Though the song didn't follow any traditional song structures, the rapid fire song ideas became the catalyst for future songs like Jesus of Suburbia, which set the rest of the album in motion once the title track and Wake Me Up When September Ends started to surface. As opposed to just writing a bunch of pop punk songs, this friendly competition became the blueprint for Green Day's second shot at the big time.