There’s a wonderful write-up at MamaPop about Green Day’s intergenerational appeal, but, much more than that, about Green Day’s place in finding oneself and one’s identity, even as early as age 11 — and at what age can one not relate to that? And it’s also about a wistful parent watching his boy grow up. Below is an excerpt. Read it all here.

I watched my sweet little boy lose his fucking mind at the Green Day show. I had never seen this side of him. I didn’t know it was there. But it was not lost on me that, even though he was at the show with his Dad, he was ecstatically discovering a world that would insist on severing parental ties in an effort to form broader identifications with music, friends, his own world, and his own sense of who he will be (who he is called to be), as opposed to who I expect to him be. He’s getting ready to fuck shit up. And that process requires loud rude music with raucous drums and power chords because these are the sounds of kicking into one’s self.

It’s difficult to be a man who admires defiance, who knows that the edge is where all the prizes are, but who also has a trail of bodies in his wake of friends who couldn’t manage that edge, who fell right off it. It’s a tight rope, that walk across the middle. Mind your senses, young man. Take care of my boy, Billie Joe Armstrong.

[This essay was written by Kelsey. Thanks for sending it in. -Delfina]

I feel like I turned the world back on when I started listening to Green Day again. They’re like those extra metallic crayons that come in specialty packs of Crayola. You can still draw without them, but the image you create isn’t quite as fabulous. With two months to go until 21st Century Breakdown hit the stores, I started listening to the boys after a year of letting my albums collect dust.

Suddenly I could get through an entire novel again, sometimes in one sitting. Suddenly I could write again. My mind became a sponge, soaking up all the paint spilled across the world. Green Day leads me through the streets of my mind with a foggier sense of direction, but a clearer sense of purpose than before. They’re more than music.

When I think Green Day, one of their songs doesn’t automatically pop into my mind. No, it’s their stories & their convictions that stick to the edges of my eyes. I don’t think you could truly love a band for four years without that happening. You have to see them all stripped to their cores, before you can start the understand the hurricane they create in my mind. They’re not in the tabloids, but I feel like I know them better than any paparazzi princess.

Green Day offers us more than any band I can think of. They bare everything in their songs; every emotion they’ve ever felt echoes through the arenas they perform in. They shower us with their quirks in interviews. They tell tall tales & make stupid jokes and somehow you still get dizzy from their honesty. Something about that sneaky grin on Billie’s lips tells you that he’s lying & so he’s not really lying at all if he knows that you know. You know?

And if their hearts on a rusted platter isn’t enough for you, then there’s still The Network and The Foxboro Hottubs to cover any element you might be missing. They’re like a romantic with a severe case of Multiple Personality Disorder. All over the place, they fit your every need like a tongue to your lips - sweet and never too salty.

And somehow through all this, I need to explain how this can turn the world back on. How did my focus shift on its axis when I plugged back into the Green Day universe? It happens when you soak up all their honesty, all that attitude that lets them try anything & it makes you want to force your eyes open and do the same before you miss out on any piece of life. If they’re just fucked up kids from broken homes, then surely there’s someone around the corner who’s pretty much the same. Maybe I’m just the same.

They make me believe in love, in laughter, in friendship, and most of all, in myself. They prove that my best friend I met at the age of six can still be my best friend thirty years down the road. They prove that love can be found at the age of eighteen. They blur the lines of reality & shake my brain until I feel silly and don’t know which path to take. But at least they open my eyes so that I at least see all the paths & try to choose which one’s right. They cut open my heart & I don’t even mind because at least then there’ll be more room for art & love to crawl in. Bury its head in my chest & set me on my way to self discorvery, whatever that means.

I think I had a point, but I lost it in my attempt to express an impossible feeling. Green Day does that to me.

If I wasn’t already crazy-in-love with Green Day (the band, not the band members!), I wouldn’t have loved the two nights at Madison Square Garden any less. I would have been even more bowled over, by the realization that until that moment I didn’t know that there existed anything so perfect — so bawdy, goofy, brilliant, emotional, and intoxicating — as a Green Day live performance.

If all they did was play their songs, it would still be a fantastic show, because their music is so fantastically good, and so great live. And the music is of course at the core of the show. Even the screwups, the songs that only get a couple lines out and then Billie Joe can’t remember the rest, like Castaway on Monday and Stuart and the Ave. on Tuesday, are just another delightful part of the rollicking ship. But Billie Joe’s presence in itself is like a force of nature.

There’s a review of Monday night’s show on Consequence of Sound, which, annoying and whiny as it is — is she actually complaining that Billie Joe doesn’t launch into speeches about health care reform, or that he’s so captivating that he can get 20,000 people to scream on command? — captures the whirlwind one-man carnival that is Billie Joe’s stage presence. And it gets in a few remarks that are right on the money. One of my favorites: “Resistance is futile. The guy’s too much fun for anybody to not have any.” And in spite of herself, the reviewer couldn’t not see Billie Joe’s sweetness: “His obvious and generous affection towards them was truly refreshing. Green Day may wail about alienation, but in this room on this night, it was a share-the-lovefest.”

Much of the review is dripping with the kind of hipster irony that is so prevalent in music writing, and that so many critics love to condemn Green Day with. God forbid one might be so uncool as to appreciate a band’s music unironically and from the heart, with the same pure joy with which it is offered up. (I can see hipsters going to the circus and scoffing because there were clowns and trapeze artists: “How predictable!”)

But even cynics are captivated by Billie Joe and co.: “Jesus of Suburbia — bombastically adolescent, cheesy, symphonic, unapologetic and hopeful — encapsulated all that was good and goofy about Green Day Monday night. Including the obvious fact that Billie Joe Armstrong really is the messiah of mall-friendly rock.” I think “mall-friendly rock” is supposed to be a bad thing, so it’s a backhanded compliment, but I’ll skip the irony, thank you, and take the remark at face value. Yep, he’s the messiah of music that is pure and heartfelt, and that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is.

I think people are confused by Billie Joe’s complete lack of pretentiousness. He is fiercely intelligent, but he openly mocks self-importance. His antics can be wonderfully stupid, and they certainly borrow from decades of showmanship — from vaudeville, the circus, preachers, rock-and-roll showmen, underground hardcore bands, and from that kid in the back of the class who cracks everyone up by farting or showing his ass (I used to teach high school and I would always get myself in trouble by finding that sort of thing hilarious…) — but they are genius. Who else can conjure up that much silliness in two and a half hours and still keep 20,000 people screaming and laughing for more? If you haven’t seen it, this video of the little story he told on Monday night is pretty damn cool.
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“What am I, nothin’ here blue eyes?” the usher playfully asked me as I tried to zoom past the entrance to Tower D.

“Nah, we’re sorry,” I said. “We thought we had to go over there, because our tickets say ‘Tower C’”.

“Lemme see,” he said, smiling as he took the page I held out to him. “Oh! You’re in heaven.”

How right he was.

As the Kaiser Chiefs cleared the stage the excitement grew. The minutes passed by painfully slowly while the crew set up the stage. The pink bunny kept us entertained, but even he wasn’t what we were waiting for. So close. So very, very close. Then there was darkness and a rising scream. It was on.

There was so much to love about the show Monday night I hardly know where to start. There was the massive singalong to “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” thousands of people roaring the words at the stage like their lives depended on it. There was “Disappearing Boy” with Billie pounding away on trusty old Blue. There was the girl who played guitar on “Jesus of Suburbia” and absolutely nailed it. Every time I thought we’d hit the high point the band made us climb even higher. I know that might seem gushy, but it’s true. When Tre attacked his drums for “21 Guns” I could have done backflips, the energy was so electrifying.

At one point I glanced down and realized just how vast a sea of people there was below me. Every one of them had their eyes trained on Billie, ready to wave their arms in the air and yell “Heeeeey ooooh!”. For once we had found something to do together, rather than using cellphones and petty differences to block each other out. Which brings me back to the singalong of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”. It echoed to the rafters. Perfectly focused, we roared, “Sometimes I wish someone up there will find me/ till then I walk alone!” That’s the power of Green Day’s music. No one was going to miss that line because everyone knew how it felt to spend a night in aimless wandering. Everyone knew that isolation could eat at their hope, but they were determined to walk on anyway. In that moment I thought, I can do this. I can take it and I will survive. Go on, universe, just you try to mess with me. There were quite a few times I lost myself singing along with the entire arena spellbound. I stepped out of my life just long enough to regain a little bit of faith in the world. Those will be my fondest memories.

After the first encore Billie Joe strode across the stage saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you” more times than I could count. He pointed at several people in the crowd to really bring home the point. Well Billie, you don’t know who I am, or who most of the people in that arena were, but I have to say one thing. The one thing that echoed in my mind long after the confetti had fallen. Thank you. I’m in heaven.

~If you enjoy reading smart musings about Green Day, check out Green Day Mind, by a die-hard fan, same age as yours truly.

Now that more large-size images of the art exhibition of works inspired by the songs on 21st Century Breakdown have been released, I’m even more interested in it.

I’m sure you’ve had this experience too: as I’m listening to the songs, images tend to come into my mind, called up by the mood and scenes suggested by the song. I think it’s kind of a natural tendency, to make words into pictures. I have more affinity with visual imagery than I do with music. I studied art myself and was immersed in the art world for many years, mainly because my former boyfriend is a professional fine artist.

So it’s cool to see individual artists’ concepts for each song. I really like “Before the Lobotomy” by Dabs and Myla. It’s like a cityscape in your mind, like in a dream, where you can see the whole city at once. It’s made up of sooty urban buildings but it’s also populated by these strange, oversize creatures, that are maybe your demons, or maybe fears and misgivings nagging at you from the outside? But they’re not really sinister, entirely, because they’re painted as cartoon characters. (And how scary could your fears be when one of them is smoking a cigarette?) It’s both dark, with a hint of hopefulness, like the song’s lyrics (I’m not sure why the person is holding a bird, but it’s pretty cool anyway, and it seems to fit), and also uplifting, like the song’s music.

I like that it sticks pretty closely to the song, like with the watery streaks at the bottom of the painting — the characters and buildings are sort of melting and disappearing — which remind you of the line “when the rain had washed away all these scattered dreams.”

“Before the Lobotomy” by Dabs/Myla
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I think fans might like “Know Your Enemy” by the London Police, because it’s a funny cartoon of the band members (though I’m not sure that it’s that close to the song itself).

“Know Your Enemy” by the London Police
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You can see all of the art for each song in large format here (it’s a large file, 10MB).

Earlier post here.

Whenever I go see Green Day, I tend to think, ahead of getting to the concert, that maybe I’ve just built up their past concert appearances in my mind, and that maybe they’re not really as great as I’ve come to believe. How could they be? It seems improbable that my wildly fanciful notions of how magical and perfect their live shows are could really be accurate. I must have been building them up in my head, right? So as I’m heading to the show, I’m thinking that maybe I should brace myself for a letdown…

And then Green Day come on stage, and they blow me away. Not only do they live up to my fanciful expectations, but they surpass them. That feeling of awe and delight that came over me at the last concert, and the ones before that, is fleeting and hard to remember accurately, because it’s just that: a feeling. But it turns out that even my over-the-top recollection is actually pale and inadequate compared to the real thing. When I’m there, in person, it all comes back, so fully it knocks me over.

I wrote this next part right after leaving the show, when I found myself enchanted with Philadelphia for no reason at all, even as I was fully of aware of how much better I like New York and couldn’t wait to get back there. Uh, it may be a bit over-the-top…

Maybe it’s the whole Green Day aura that surrounds a special trip to see this very special set of mesmerizing magical men, who are just like an improbable fairy tale. They make the world sweet and sparkling. For a few hours, it’s like you live on another plane, another reality where everything pops, is more beautiful, has more meaning, and is just complete, grinning, stupid, delight. And it leaves behind a streak of magic fairy dust that you carry with you back in your daily world, where everything is suddenly more lovely, more perfect. I’m sitting at the train station as I write this, facing the track, under fluorescent lights. It’s a dismal place, except not now, because Green Day touched it with their magic wand. (No, not that magic wand… get your head out of the gutter!)

As always, it’s hard to find the words to describe what Green Day is like. I started to write “what seeing Green Day is like,” but that’s not it. It’s like they have an essence that just is, and you sometimes, now and then if you’re really really lucky, get to be in its presence and become touched by it, and then you carry it with you, like a glow.

Anyone reading this who is not a crazy-obsessed fan of Green Day will surmise that I am a blithering idiot. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, that’s Mrs. Blithering Idiot to you!

That’s the end of the waxing insane portion of this show recap… (or maybe not).

I’m not going to write about the particular things that happened at this show. You can read those reviews elsewhere. (I haven’t looked at any yet but I can add some links later.) For me, it’s not about the particular moments, it’s a whole magical experience that leaves you dizzy and slack-jawed. I know people like to relate the little tidbits, the moments when Billie Joe said this or did that, or one of the other band members did whatever, but there is no essential moment for me. Yes, there were bits I noticed and loved, like the fact that when they played Welcome to Paradise, and then again in parts of other songs, like Basket Case and She, Billie Joe played his guitar like he was 22 again, using the same wide-legged stance, with one leg thrust forward, and his head thrashing. He’s done so much since then that sometimes it’s hard to remember that he’s that same guy. And it’s lovely — hell, it’s pretty damn thrilling — to be reminded.

Even the professional music reviewers, whose job it is to write about every concert, whether they like the band or not, can’t help but gush that Billie Joe is a mesmerizing performer. He doesn’t stop for an instant. (And it’s so cute that he’s just so happy. At one point he was having so much fun running around that he almost forgot he had to dash back to the mic to sing the next verse.) But if I had to pick one word to describe his stage performance it’s his incredible generosity. He’s like the party host who gives all of himself, who reaches out to every single person, with everything he has, to make damn sure that every last one is having a great time. I think he would be handing out trays of cookies in the crowd if he could. (When he does run up into the stands it’s funny to see the security guy, whose job it is to protect him, having an aneurysm.)

At the very beginning of the show, in the middle of the first song, Billie Joe brought a guy up on stage to tell him, personally, to calm down. “They want to kick you out,” he said. He held him by the shoulders to talk right into is eyes and gently get him to listen to reason. What other rock star puts himself out like that for someone, and for a guy who was being a jerk, no less? It was a beautiful, revealing snapshot. (There’s a video and a photo of it.)

But it’s not just a good time he’s offering up, it’s also joy and redemption. (I knew I wasn’t done being over-the-top…) Billie Joe is jet-powered, raunchy and insubordinate, yet he’s also deeply soulful and emotional. His preacher shtick (saving an audience member) and his serious indictment of the hypocrisy of (at least some) religious leaders, specifically in East Jesus Nowhere, have an unspoken counterpoint: you can be saved for real, just not by following hollow leaders or believing hollow lies. Your salvation is right here: it’s all around you every day. You can be generous, look outward, care about what’s happening in the world. He would never presume to tell you what to do, but he’s a shining example.

How he feels about all of us seems to be what he expressed in one of his earliest songs:

I’m losing what’s left of my dignity
A small price I’ll pay to see that you’re happy
Forget all the disappointments you have faced
Open up your worried world and let me in.

————————-
Update: Review from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Another review and setlist.

~Niki Lee, who wrote the essay “Seize the Green Day” about her experiences as a Green Day fan, has expanded it into a book, available to buy here, along with a free preview.

I’ve been of several minds about this over time, but lately it’s been increasingly nagging at me that Green Day fans, generally speaking, don’t have a whole lot in common with one another. This shouldn’t come as any surprise, since there are literally millions of fans, and Green Day’s appeal is so broad that people come to love the band for any number of reasons. But I suppose it’s a little disappointing, since it would be nice to think of Green Day as some kind of magical thread that connects the, uhm, true believers in some sort of community of shared understanding.

When the Wall Street Journal wrote recently, about Green Day’s Seattle concert, “Its urgent, polished music and angry, damning yet curiously hopeful and occasionally romantic lyrics foster a sense of community with Green Day’s followers—we’re in this mess together, they seem to say, so let’s rock,” I think they were being a bit optimistic. Green Day’s music inspires a kind of crazy-in-love excitement in fans, but the message of the songs, the political indictment and the sense that society has been headed in a frightening direction, seems to me to be mostly lost. The “let’s rock” part is true enough. The rest, not so much. Judging by the right-wing sympathies expressed by so many online fans, it seems that most fans either already agreed to some degree with Green Day’s political views or remained unmoved my them.

Of course, any given fan will have something in common with some subset of other fans. If you’re reading this, you have in common with the other couple dozen people reading this that you have a high tolerance for some fairly uninteresting and disjointed ramblings… (The site gets a few hundred visitors a day, but most of them don’t read this kind of stuff.)

For me, my fandom experience started out as a 30-year-old woman who loved Dookie with all her heart and soul. If there were other 30-year old women who felt the same way, I was unaware of them. So go figure: it wasn’t an auspicious starting point for some kind of simpatico Green-Day-loving community. The only fans I knew of were the ones I saw at concerts, and they were all, or at least seemed to be, fifteen year old amped-up boys and fifteen year old wide-eyed girls. I like fifteen year olds (I used to teach high school), and I often feel I have more in common with many teenagers that with people my own age, but I didn’t think of the wild boys slamming each other in the pit or the shy girls with hearts drawn on their Green Day t-shirts as any kind of soulmates.

Being a Green Day fan was hard to explain, and embarrassing. It wasn’t that I felt moved by songs about masturbation and boredom, it was the music itself that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. The lyrics were smart and heartfelt, but in my passion for this band they were secondary. And it wasn’t that I was in love with the band members, either. As enchanted as I was by the gross snot tricks, the skinny legs and knobby knees, and the perennially fucked up hair (I’m being funny but I was in fact quite enchanted by all of that), the members of Green Day were not exactly my idea of heartthrobs. It was the music: the driving guitar, the intense energy, the sweet and addictive melodies. Which may be odd, because I’m not very musical. I don’t have a good ear, and there isn’t a lot of music that I just love. (Mostly I enjoy the simplicity and raw power of punk rock.) But Green Day was and is in its own category, and nothing else spoke or speaks to me the way only their music can. More » » »

Green Day videos- It should be another art form, right?
I for one, love music videos, ever since I was really little; back when “Pop Up Video” was on all the time. I’d get up in the mornings and watch it with my Dad, who would explain to me about the bands and tell me a little story of when he watched the same videos. It’s little moments like these that make music so awesome; how deeply it has been influencing my life. So when I first laid eyes on a Green Day music video, it was a welcome experience. I can understand how some may view music videos as really corny companions to good songs or just a lame oppertunity for the band to make some money. I believe, on the other hand, It should be an oppertunity to make an artistic statement.
The first glimpse of Green Day I saw was “American Idiot.” It was the first time I saw them, all angry and righteous and covered in green slime. I mean it when I say I’d never seen anything like it; my brain soaked up everything it could in those rip-roaring three minutes. Suddenly I had faces to go with the names I’d been hearing. And I just had to know what it was they were trying to tell me. I thought it was the coolest thing- all that green slime and how the band was jumping around like a trio of Ritalin kids. I always remember Tre running around his drum kit in slow motion, sticks flailing madly, or Billie Joe throwing his guitar to the floor and all the green slime came flying up.
I was very happy when I learned more videos were soon to follow. In all honesty, I’ve seen the ones for “Holiday” and “Boulevard” like, a million times. I was really taken in by the artistic side of it all, mainly because I’m an artist myself and I’m perceptive to that kind of thing. I loved how they managed to capture the style of the album so well.
The sad thing about all this is that VH1 played more videos in 2005 than it does now…how awful. Anyway, I used to wake up in the mornings and it would just be me and the television for awhile, and that is what I would watch. For some reason, it’s such a fond memory: wake ing up at eight in the morning to catch “Holiday” on VH1 while eating a bowl of watermelon for breakfast. After awhile, it came routine: get up, eat watermelon, watch Green Day.
I quickly learned to hate some of the other videos I had to sit through before the guys would come on: Coldplay’s ‘Speed of Sound,’ Lifehouse’s, ‘You and Me,’ and the Foo Fighters’ ‘Best of You.’ (I actually really like that band now, but has anyone seen that video? Jeez.) And Mariah Carey! Argh…I wanted Billie to invade her video and clobber her over the head with his guitar…but I digress. I would get mad when one of those videos took Green Day’s place in the Top Twenty Countdown, too. ;)
I watched “Holiday” too much- maybe.
I knew all the drumming, and the guitar cues. It took me the longest time to figure out Mike was Sid Vicious in the bar scene, Billie got in a fight with himself and that Tre was the woman in drag (Seriously!) She did seem familar… Clearly this was my favorite video, too; it gave me the first impression of the band. I think that is what videos are for, actually: a way to connect with the fans. They tell stories using the band as characters, they carry messages, and of course, they attempt at being perfect companions to their songs. I love the new videos of “Know Your Enemy” and “21 Guns,” the latter being my fave of the two. I think it’s great the guys are still making videos and giving a round of new fans the chance to see them, and maybe give them a message or two.
Their videos are rooted in personal things for me; I fondly remember one morning after spending the night at my sister’s house, when my two little nieces woke up with me and we cuddled together on the couch as “Holiday” came on. They loved it, giggling at the crazy antics and singing the chorous with me, inspite of the fact they made up most of the words. They wanted to see it again every time they saw me after that. They’re much older now, about six and seven, and recently I asked them if they remembered, ‘the Guys in the Car.’ They smiled at me and told me they did. So, for old time’s sake, I played it for them on the computer, with one kid in my lap and the other pulling up a chair beside me.
That’s pretty cool for just one measly music video. ‘It’s just music’ my butt.

Sorry for the lack of posts. Thanks to Amanda for keeping things up with her always thought-provoking writing. I’ve been out of town, but I’m also going to post less often. There has been so much news in the last few months that even posting a few items means sifting through dozens of possible news bits, and I just don’t feel like it. I don’t really care about the minutia of the news — and I’ve spared anyone reading here the endless articles that are out there making a big to-do about some tangential remark made by the guys in an interview, and all the reviews of the album that miss the mark by a mile — and I definitely don’t care about the promotional aspect of putting out a new album.

To me, and I think to most of you who may be reading this, Green Day is a personal thing. The music is something that sits with you through the many moments of your day to day. And there are the live shows, which are special and rare (unless you follow them on tour, live shows are relatively rare to each of us even if the guys play a whole lot of them). It’s nice to keep up with what the band is doing, but, essentially, everything besides the actual music is just noise, at least to me. Sometimes what’s out there is very entertaining, or funny, or sweet, especially when the guys have their silly, or charming, or profound moments, but many times info that has been managed and mediated just feels like it creates more distance rather than a greater understanding or appreciation of the band.

The new album is here, at last, and the long vigil of waiting and watching and hoping that soon, oh soon please, Green Day might grace us with something wonderful, is over. The wonderfulness is here, and it’s not just in the album itself, but also in the upcoming tour, the recent club shows, and the wealth of public appearances. You can listen to the new songs over and over, discover something new with every listen, and then hear them all over again. You can see Green Day on TV, you can drool over videos and pictures to your heart’s content. It’s an embarrassment of riches. I guess I don’t feel that much of a need to pay particular attention to Green Day news in order to unearth some little detail that six months ago might have been a tidbit to cherish.

One of the things I love most about 21st Century Breakdown is that it doesn’t quite fit in my head. I’ve listened to it over and over and I still find myself surprised. At first I thought it was weird and a little too hopeless. Then I realized that Green Day had done it again. They had put words to the vague uneasy feelings floating around in my head. It’s as if they knew what I was thinking even before I did. It’s a strange world we live in now, caught between hope and a sense of impending disaster. We aren’t used to this kind of tightrope. But Green Day hasn’t lost their fighting spirit, and neither should we.

I was listening to “21 Guns” today when I noticed the coursing energy of the guitar and drums under what I thought was a really sad song. The music was fighting back against the despair even as it expressed it. I think that’s the most important thing to remember when the world is going to hell. You don’t have to stand for it, but neither do you have to pretend it isn’t happening. In the end life doesn’t make any sense no matter what direction it’s taking. This album full of mariachi band-infused songs and complex arrangements is a perfect reflection of the way things can change instantly. It helps clear some of the clutter we accumulate around ourselves. What’s left really is a breakdown. People have lost their homes and the government has taken over in ways the happy haze of the 90s could never have predicted. It’s funny how often ideas that start out seeming crazy end up making perfect sense.

21st Century Breakdown takes a little more getting used to than American Idiot did. It doesn’t seem to tell people what they want to hear, because there is no one figure or institution to use as a target of the blame. It can’t be interpreted in so straightforward a fashion. I think that’s precisely the point. Where American Idiot identified clear sources of problems and tried to imagine a solution, 21st Century Breakdown wades farther in to find that this is much more complicated than we thought. It isn’t about small town dreams and finding your way anymore. It’s abound finding your way in a world tilted widely on its axis. The rules have changed. Luckily we always have Green Day to help us puzzle it out. It’s going be a hell of a ride.

P.S. I’m going to be at the Madison Square Garden show on July 27th, up in section 420 something. If you’re around too, wave at the specks on the ceiling. One of them is bound to be me :).

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