The one Green Day song featuring every band member singing
By the time Green Day came into the 2000s, they were dangerously close to being considered the dorky dads of pop-punk. They may have started the genre all the way back in 1994 with the release of Dookie, but the different genre-hopping they did on every album left a lot of their hardcore fans burned or stopped listening altogether in favour of more interesting acts like Blink-182. The band needed to deliver if they were going to go the distance, and Billie Joe Armstrong found the best way forward…by not having himself take the reins.
If they had had their way, most of their next album was bound to be the same drawn-out schtick they had been doing in the days of Dookie. Since the band had spent so much time not making the kind of music that made them famous, Cigarettes and Valentines was meant to be the true return to form, only for some sneaky bastard to waltz into the studio and leave with the tapes.
Instead of the group just re-recording everything, Armstrong thought they needed to start over from scratch. What they had laid down was far from the best thing they had ever done, and they needed to aim higher now that bands like Sum 41 and New Found Glory were hot on their tail. In the middle of recording sessions, though, one day off led to Mike Dirnt making the basis for what would become ‘Homecoming’.
Since Armstrong was dealing with court proceedings and drummer Tre Cool was meeting with divorce lawyers, Dirnt made a pitiful son about being left alone at the studio called ‘Nobody Likes You’. The entire thing may have been played for laughs. Still, Armstrong knew there was something to Dirnt’s song they hadn’t tapped into before.
While goofing around in the studio, Cool and Armstrong came up with their own 30-second songs to complement what Dirnt had already made, stringing them together for ‘Homecoming’, eventually expanding it to nine minutes. Despite not being taken seriously at all, Armstrong knew that this might be the way forward: making a pop-punk rock opera.
After tying everything together with ‘American Idiot’, ‘Homecoming’ was looked at as the grand finale of the album right before the bittersweet track ‘Whatsername’. When it came time to perform the song, Armstrong was diplomatic about bestowing lead vocal duties to everyone.
Right as ‘East 12th St’ wraps up, Dirnt comes screaming in with ‘Nobody Likes You’ before slamming into Cool’s ‘Rock and Roll Girlfriend’, which sounds like both a 1950s rock and roll jam and the theme track to some X-rated reality show about rock and roll domestic life. Whereas Cool and Dirnt only stepped behind the mic for comedic purposes in the past, their presence breaks up the monotony of the piece, eventually giving way to the anthemic chorus that closes out the song.
Now that the lead vocal door was broken down, Armstrong would end up using the rest of the band as co-vocalists half the time, with Dirnt returning to sing on songs like ‘American Eulogy’ off 21st Century Breakdown. In a world where almost every non-singing musician has lead singer envy, sometimes letting the other guys sing can be a blessing in disguise.
