10 Things You Never Knew About Green Day
1. Their First Epic Was Written Out Of Boredom
Green Day really had their work cut out for them once Billie wrote the title track of American Idiot. Being one of the most caustic rock songs they would ever write, the idea of making an entire record that could live up to that one song's potential was a fairly daunting task at the outset. At a time when most bands would start to feel the pressure piling up, Mike Dirnt actually found a way through the tension out of one day of boredom in the studio.
Arriving on an off day when Armstrong and Cool were busy with legal proceedings, Dirnt started to come up with a song on an acoustic guitar that he called Nobody Likes You. Even though the song was meant as a bit of a goof, Armstrong was impressed when he came back in the studio and thought it would be fun if he wrote a little snippet of a song as well. All of a sudden, these little fragments piled up and were then morphed together into the Homecoming suite that closes out the album.
Being the extra fuel that they needed, Armstrong doubled down on this with the Jesus of Suburbia suite at the start of the record, even going so far as to weave separate tracks together like the ending of Holiday fading into the tremolo guitar of Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Considering that most of this record feels meticulously planned out down to the very last note, it's astonishing to think that it started from just a lonely bass player sitting in a studio really bored.