Green Day is the new cover of Rolling Stone magazine! (As seen below.) The magazine is out now digitally and in stores this Friday, September 9th.
In the digital article with Green Day for Rolling Stone, there are discussions about Billie Joe Armstrong dealing with pills and alcohol, how sobriety has come naturally to him, the celebration of his 20th wedding anniversary, the Broadway version of American Idiot, his upcoming movie Ordinary World, not needing cutting-edge producers and pop-star guests to get a hit.
There are also discussions about Mike Dirnt dealing with one of the painful challenges of his life after his wife of seven years was diagnosed with breast cancer, as well as Tré Cool not being eager to get back to work either after being on an extended honeymoon with his new wife.
Here’s just some of the Rolling Stone article:
The album begins with the Who-ish anthem “Somewhere Now,” which finds Armstrong feeling “spiritually broken.” “It’s just that gloom and trying to rise above it,” he says. “That’s sort of what the record is about.”
The album also grapples with what Armstrong sees as a troubled America. “The world looks like an old Dead Kennedys album cover now,” he says. There’s more than one reference to police brutality (an issue he was talking about in the Nineties) and Black Lives Matter protests. “I think my role is to shut up and listen,” he says. “A lot of white people should shut up and listen. They really don’t know what the African-American experience truly is. When you have people getting shot in their cars for no reason and being put in fucking jail cells and it’s for profit, we have a serious problem, and the first thing you need to do is get educated. Don’t try to do this, like, ‘Blue lives matter.’ Don’t try to do the ‘All lives matter.’ Just shut up and listen to the experience. And then move forward after that.”
Green Day have never stopped making young fans, so unlike many veteran bands, they still see plenty of fresh faces in the audience. But last year, a month after their Hall of Fame induction, Green Day returned to 924 Gilman to play a secret show for the oldest crowd they’ve ever seen: It was a class reunion for their early-Nineties scene, a club packed with grown-up punks. “That was so emotional,” Armstrong says. “Looking out in the crowd, you see familiar faces that once had piercings and dyed purple hair, and now it’s covered in gray.” Some of those punk kids are now “educators, they’re artists, they’re authors,” who used punk as Armstrong did, as a door “into the idea of being able to express yourself.”
“It’s like running into an old friend,” he says, “and you’re playing catch-up on all the things that happen in a 40-year life span – you think of how much has changed in your own life. It’s a trip. Fuck! But here we are.” Armstrong sighs. “If that was the last gig I ever played for the rest of my life,” he says, “I could walk away happy.”
You can read the full Rolling Stone article HERE
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