Green Day - "Homecoming"

Billie Joe Armstrong (vocals and guitars) wrote what was the first single of Green Day's last album to date, the song "American Idiot". He'd written a bunch of other songs too, but the band felt that this song was far better so it was like : "This is where we should start from". So they scrapped all of what they had done before. But the song "American Idiot" proved a hard fact to follow. Mike Dirnt (bass) found the solution : comic relief.

Tré Cool (drums) : "Mike was in the studio one day, and he wrote this 30-second song that was really funny and cool. It was basically a song about being alone in the studio. Then Billie came back and was like, 'Oh I want to do that', and he wrote a 30-second song and stuck that on the end of Mike's. Then they were like, 'Tré, you make one'. So then I made one, and then Mike made another one, and Billie made another one, and we kept that going until we had ten minutes of music. It started off funny and took more of a serious turn towards the end. We were trying to out-do each other and make it better than the one we did before".

Armstrong : "We kept connecting these little half-minutes bits until we had something. I wanted to have one great part after another - boom, boom, boom - all put together really well. It's a tricky thing to do and the transitions are really important".

Cool : "A lot of things came from the idea of writing a bunch of 30-second songs". One of those is of course the song "Homecoming", one of the two "rock operas" on the album that last for 9 minutes.

Available on the album "American Idiot"