(Credits: Far Out / Press)
“The older you get as a songwriter, the more you second-guess yourself,” Billie Joe Armstrong once said. “You say anything you want. But at the same time, you have to challenge yourself.”
For Armstrong, growing older was a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because he could comfortably grow into his artistic voice and inspire others to greatness. A curse, because with wisdom came other insecurities, like the constant haunt of whether he’s making the right decisions, or whether the art he was putting out lived up to the high standards he’d already set for himself as a young punk powerhouse.
When he spoke to Esquire about it, Armstrong admitted the toughest part of sudden fame was realising that once you’ve got an audience, you feel the need to keep them buzzing about what you’re doing. Instead of just cracking on with whatever felt right, Green Day’s success brought a different kind of pressure – one he hadn’t seen coming. It wasn’t simply about playing the songs he fancied anymore, but about doing it in a way that would keep people impressed and hungry for more.
The problem is, once you start fretting over whether you’re hitting the mark or not, you end up tying yourself in knots. That kind of second-guessing only ramps up the pressure, even when the songs themselves land with people. It’s why he says he finds it tough to go back to records like 21st Century Breakdown. To him, they’re less about the praise they got at the time and more a reminder of the graft and the grind it took just to get them made.
But this paranoia, both of being a potential sell-out and not living up to his own expectations, met its peak with the ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, ¡Tré! trilogy, for two reasons: that pulling off a triple album was exhausting, and that Armstrong wasn’t looking after himself enough at the time either. “I was putting so much pressure on myself,” he reflected. “It’s a triple album, which is absurd. There was not a lot of self-care going on, if any at all. And my panic attacks were going up and turning into rage attacks.”
Addicted to Klonopin and “mixing it with alcohol”, Armstrong wasn’t in the best headspace to try to create Green Day-level art, let alone a triple album, and the overwhelming urge to “keep writing, writing, writing”, all while losing direction, mentally, physically, and creatively, started to take its toll. Most fans saw it as such, claiming it was simply too much too fast without enough quality to actually be good, at least not in the way they expected from Green Day at this particular stage in their career.
But while people claim a lot of the music sounds the same and most of the songs feel more like filler than the masterpieces they’d grown used to, there were some parts of the trilogy worth paying attention to, if you ignore the haste and high-stakes environment they emerged from. Like ‘Kill The DJ’, which actually seemed like they were on the cusp of greatness and genuine development beyond the glossy sheen of American Idiot. But in the end, it seemed like chasing greatness was the one thing that ultimately destroyed it.
But perhaps it’s because songs like that had the one thing most of the others didn’t; the desire to venture outside of their usual safety net and into something new, without losing grip of the core sensibilities people already knew and love. It was a track designed to fill floors, to get people moving, though with a taste of something that went beyond their familiar punk rhythms.
As Armstrong put it, “This song is sort of a left turn, kind of going into something more of a four-on-the-floor dance groove.”
He continued, “Mike [Dirnt] was really like, ‘Well, let’s do something that’s more like Blondie’s ‘Heart Of Glass’, kind of a disco feel to it.’ We’ve always kind of got into grooves and things like that, with like ‘When I Come Around’ and ‘Brain Stew,’ but this is the first time we went full-on dance music, but with a Green Day approach to it.”
Who knows – maybe if they’d leaned more into those innovative spaces, the trilogy would have been even better.
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