Joining host Kevan Kenney for a special Audacy Check-In on the release day of their 14th studio album, Saviors, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool of Green Day dropped by the Hard Rock Hotel New York to let us in on their big 2024 celebrations.
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Out now, Green Day's new full-length Saviors -- one of our most anticipated albums of 2024 -- just adds to the band's party vibe surrounding the 30th and 20th anniversaries respectively of their iconic Dookie and American Idiot releases.
Getting into their immediate schedule, frontman Billie Joe says, “We played in the subway the other day and then we played Irving Plaza last night, and now we're gonna go to Rough Trade and play a Rock and acoustic set... this is one of the greatest days of our lives.”
Looking back quickly to their early days, Kevan wondered if playing in the NYC subway reminded them of any dives from years past. Mike remembers Tré Cool being their number one booking guy back then, and aside from a wayward mountain top show -- that Tré says “rocked” despite a number of hurdles, “He was actually very good at it and he booked some of our best tours in vans,” says Dirnt.
Fast-forward a whole bunch of years -- and fans have been graced with 15 all-new Green Day tracks on their fourteenth studio album, begging the question at this point in the game: What makes a song “good” in the band’s opinion?
“Someone told me once, it's like: ‘Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus,’ and I kind of stuck to that,” Billie Joe explains. “You know, except maybe I've turned the bridge... It's like verse, bridge, chorus or something like that. But all of my favorite bands have always had that kind of formula to it, and it's just whatever you end up getting creative with to make them special.”
Billie Joe had a run-in with guitar icon Eddie Van Halen before his passing, where he bestowed some incredible advice about letting go of riffs and focusing on songwriting. “Growing up a punk rocker, I enjoy being misunderstood,” he says about any misconceptions people may have had about himself and the band’s trajectory over their career. “It’s been good fuel," adds Mike, “I think if we're not understood it's kind of like, ‘ok, well, let's prove them wrong,’ you know? That's just a band practice mentality, but it's fuel, man. It's great... and we just love good songs, good melodies. If it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, you're doing something, right.”
Fostering that fuel as time goes by, Bille Joe says, means “we have to be patient and wait for those songs that are inspired and feel like it's vitality, really. I think it's like the eternal 16-year-old that just really wants to keep, you know, in your bedroom rocking out, playing air guitar and it's like just that escape. I think music has always been an escape for me, and the great thing is, I'm a fan of music and I get inspired by what other people do. That's what kind of creates the fuel to keep the band going and keeping us vital.”
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Taking their show on the road this year with The Smashing Pumpkins and Rancid, Green Day will be performing both of their iconic albums Dookie and American Idiot in full as part of their 30th and 20th anniversaries respectively. The latter, American Idiot, Mike Dirnt has said in past interviews, was inspired by the aspirational aspect of Hip Hop for the ambition of the record.
“It was sort of intentional,” Dirnt explains, “in the sense of, we were just looking at Hip Hop artists, they're like, ‘We're gonna take over the world, you know, we're gonna reach for the stars, we're gonna take over the world.’ That mentality is, whether you do it or not, the idea that there's no limit, is everything”
Billie Joe agrees, saying “There's certain creativity that, in that time period that was really great where like Eminem was using a different identity with Slim Shady, you know, that's conceptual, which I thought was so cool. And then, the Outkast record that came out at around 2003 was just like, it felt like a concept record. There's that type of boldness and ambition that we wanted to come across in ‘American idiot.’”
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Bringing it back full circle to Saviors, “I think the biggest statement we wanted to make on this record is actually making an album that I think is pretty rare,” Billie Joe says. “Because right now, with TikTok and streaming, people are looking for one song and it's like they're shooting bullets in the dark and looking for a unicorn. For us, it was like, we wanted to make an entire album which was just, it's almost like the rebel streak in us. We wanted to make 15 great songs to put on an album that can take you on a ride and a journey. Maybe that's not what people are doing these days, I'm not really sure, but for us, that was the statement we wanted to make and people have really been responding great to it.”
Check out Kevan Kenney’s full Audacy Check In with Green Day above, and stay tuned for more conversations with your favorite artists on Audacy.com/live.
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