With Green Day back in the studio, speculation on what their next album will be like has started up once again. The breadth of Green Day’s work has been so wide that I think we can expect anything and everything, and personally I’m happy just to wait and see what they gift us with. But one of the issues that fans often discuss is whether their album will be political or have political content of some kind.

To me the issue is not so cut-and-dried. Everything is political. In writing a song, whether a band is creating lyrics that accept or reject the status quo, or whether they are making a commentary on the state of the world or staying quiet about it, everything has either an explicit or implicit political message. Ignoring political issues tends to have a reinforcing effect on the status quo, so doing that is not non-political, it’s just the other side of the coin of speaking openly about the issues that affect us all.

Politics are the fabric that make up our lives, both personally and collectively. I don’t mean electoral politics, but the broader issues: what is right and what is wrong, who has power and who is powerless, who is suffering at the hands of another and why, who does or does not have access to resources, information, political freedoms and personal autonomy, and so on. Musicians can deal with these issues in their songs on a personal level, singing about how they affect their own lives, or they can reach out more broadly and talk about how larger groups, or even the people of the world, are affected. The more forcefully that a song makes a statement about the state of the world, or large segments of it, and especially if it talks specifically about government policies, the more we tend to label it as “political.”

In a recent interview, Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie makes an interesting distinction between protest songs and political albums. He says that the way the media covers protests, they look for a familiar script, something that the public can instantly identify, so that a protest becomes boiled down to just one simplistic phrase or talking point: “It’s the editor and the producer and director’s job to find the wing-nuttiest people in the protest and single them out. It’s such a simple and easy talking point, that as soon as you say that word, that’s all that you end up talking about with your music.”

But a political album, on the other hand, is much broader than that. It’s not driven by a single issue. A political album brings together many threads and ties them into a coherent whole. The most effective ones tie together not just the issues but they also make them personal, so we the listeners can feel how the songwriter feels about the issues and how they affect his or her own life and his or her thinking, and, by extension, ours, because we live in the same world and deal with the same challenges, disappointments, frustrations, and hopes. But many of us would not know how to articulate them so clearly and so movingly. The best songs sing to us about ourselves and our own emotions, sometimes explaining feelings and thoughts we didn’t even know we had. And they connect what we see and feel to what millions of others do too.

That’s where American Idiot is such a brilliant album. The songs speak to us about the troubles of the world, a few of them very explicitly about very specific political problems, others more generally about alienation and heartache, but in a way that is intensely personal. American Idiot doesn’t preach, it just says, “This is what I see and feel. Do you see it too?”

So I’m not concerned about whether Green Day’s next album will be “political.” To me it’s a given that it will be, in some way, the only question is what form that message will take. And I can’t wait to find out.