The Green Day song inspired by The Kinks and The Who
Green Day have never been afraid to wear their influences on their sleeve and pay tribute to their forefathers. On occasion, they’ve done this overtly, but Billie Joe Armstrong found a more subtle way of showing his respect to the legendary British bands The Who and The Kinks on’ Warning’.
The track appeared on the band’s sixth album of the same name, released in 2000. At the time, the LP marked a turning point in Green Day’s career for all the wrong reasons, as it was a relative commercial failure and didn’t sell as many copies as expected. It still charted highly internationally and would be the highest-selling album in most bands’ catalogues, but Green Day’s standards differ from the average group.
During the recording process, Armstrong listened to a lot of Bob Dylan, specifically his album Bringing It All Back Home, which led to him writing politically-charged lyrics. America was going through a state of flux as the nation adopted conservatism ahead of the inevitable election of George W. Bush, and Armstrong felt incensed.
However, rather than write an amped-up punk track fuelled by his anger, Armstrong turned to his acoustic guitar for ‘Warning’, channelling the spirit of The Kinks and The Who. Recalling the writing process to Rolling Stone, the Green Day frontman said: “After ‘Time of Your Life,’ I started getting into playing more acoustic guitar, and I really wanted to have more for Warning. And there was also a lot of kind of bad pop-punk that was starting to happen, and I wanted to go against that genre. This felt like the next step. I had been getting into listening to more of the Kinks and the Who, who found a lot of power in an acoustic song and used the guitar almost like a drum.
“‘Pinball Wizard’ is so percussive. I wrote this right before the election between George Bush and Al Gore. I started feeling the political wheels starting to turn toward conservatism a little bit. I think that song is sort of about declaring that you’re stepping out of the line, you’re not part of the sheep, and trying to find your own individualism. It felt like we were diving into something that was more conceptual for sure.”
‘Warning’ is a song which encapsulates a moment in time, and with hindsight, people should have listened to what he was saying on the track. However, Armstrong does have a slight issue with how it sounds on the record. He explained: “I’d like to go back and rerecord that album. It was right when Pro Tools started happening. I want to go back and just do everything more live because I think ‘Minority’ live is a lot better than it came out on the album. But that’s just one of those things that you think about too much.”
In the two decades since Green Day released ‘Warning’, America has become even more divided than when he initially wrote it, and Armstrong’s relationship with his homeland has continued to wane. During this time, the singer has continued to use his voice as a political tool, rather than staying silent, most notably on 2004’s American Idiot.
