Paul Zollo Interviews Billie Joe Armstrong at Bluerailroad: Why It Matters to the Writer of Fiction and Why It Matters to Me

I've discovered an insightful interview: Inside Green Day with Billie Joe Armstrong, by Paul Zollo, in an online magazine of the arts: Bluerailroad. Zollo sets the scene for his interviews, and discusses the background of each songwriter, so the reader imagines the conversation in real time.

Armstrong's interview took place soon after the 2000 release of the Green Day album, Warning, one of my personal favorites, at a time when some critics considered Green Day to be in a slump. You would never know it from Zollo's balanced article, and Armstrong's thoughtful responses to Zollo's questions.

Zollo, the author of the classic Songwriters on Songwriting (De Capo Press, 4th ed, c2003), and Bluerailroad's editor, is compiling a second collection of interviews with prominent songwriters, to be published as a Volume 2. Generously, Zollo is publishing a selection of the interviews at Bluerailroad, including the full text of an incredible interview with James Taylor, a Woody Guthrie tribute, Armstrong's interview, and a monthly question and answer column with Bob Dylan.

Within some of the interviews, Zollo, a photographer, as well as a singer, writer, and songwriter, intersperses his own photographs of the artists, and a selection of their songs. True to its name as an online magazine of the arts, Bluerailroad also offers original fiction and poetry.

You will also find classic interview excerpts from Songwriters on Songwriting on Paul Zollo's blog at American Songwriter. In her 1989 interview, Carole King discusses writer's block:

"Songwriters, both lyricists and melody writers, are often plagued with the thing most often known as writer’s block. All writers are, writers of prose as well. I have found that the key to not being blocked is to not worry about it. Ever... Trust that it will be there. If it ever was once and you’ve ever done it once, it will be back. It always comes back and the only thing that is a problem is when you get in your own way worrying about it." ~ Carole King

Here's a tiny sample from Billie Joe Armstrong's interview with Paul Zollo:

Zollo: "Where do you think the great songs come from?"

Armstrong: "I don’t know. I really don’t. It comes from somewhere deep down inside of you that you didn’t even know existed. It’s kind of like seeing a shrink or something. (Laughs) There can be a lot of anger, or sadness, or joy, that you had but you didn’t even know you really had – but it can all come out. You feel a connection with it, and so other people can, too. You strike a nerve." ~ Billie Joe Armstrong


Since that time, Billie Joe Armstrong has had a lot of time to think about his songwriting process and where his songs come from; but sometimes I think it's best, like he said it then, to say it plain. A fellow writer, Alisia Leavitt, recently posted on her blog about a cathartic experience she had writing a scene in her novel-in-progress. She titled the post: Becoming Emotionally Involved. The more I read about songwriters and their process, and writers and their process, the more I am convinced song= story= poem= narrative= art= life, and that creativity, in music, writing, or the visual arts, all comes from the same place; we just use different languages and the instrument of the individual to express it, and emotion is the key.

I'm planning to buy Zollo's book, Songwriters on Songwriting, appreciating the insight I can gain from each artist's view on the creative process, and I'm looking forward to the second volume. And now, I wonder, all along, have I been missing something? Should it have been obvious to me that song= story= poem= narrative= art= life? It has come to me as a revelation, why, I am drawn to music, beyond being a human, and why, Billie Joe Armstrong's songs have had such a profound effect on me, even though I cannot identify with their details. I always knew a song was a poem, but I didn't know it was a story, my story, rendered in the emotion it conveys.

When I was a little girl I heard a song on the radio in the dark in the middle of the night: Richard Harris singing Someone Left the Cake out in the Rain. I don't think that I can take it, cause it took so long to bake it, and I'll never find that recipe again. Oh, no. Oh, no.... I've barely heard that song again in my entire life, but I'll never forget those words and the melody, because of what combination? The unusual words (on the surface silly), the music, and the emotion in the voice, parts of it ruined for me by the hokey music, but the overriding emotion winning out, Richard Harris singing me his story. I was "arrested" by that song, and it made an "indelible mark." And somehow, that song relates- to Billie Joe Armstrong- and to every other song, and to every other novel, and to every other poem, and every other painting, and every other drawing I've ever loved or responded to- all parts of me, and who I am.

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For my other articles about Billie Joe Armstrong, the song writing process, and the writing process, please click on the labels below this post.

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Note: Paul Zollo kindly contacted me and sent me a complimentary copy of Songwriters on Songwriting. Thank you, Paul.

Billie Joe Compares his Song Writing Process to Writing a Novel

Billie Joe Armstrong

Tre Cool and Mike Dirnt

Wearing Leather Jackets

(And Pensive Expressions)

Studio Shot

I just found a great article I'd never seen before, where Billie Joe Armstrong (or at least his interviewer with the Associated Press) acknowledges that the song writing he's accomplished with the past two Green Day concept albums, American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown, is akin to writing a novel.

Here's the link to the article, widely published, with the interesting title: Green Day is creating a 'soundtrack to life'

Billie Joe Armstrong and bass player, Mike Dirnt, do the bulk of the talking. The "soundtrack to life" quote is courtesy of Green Day's drummer, Tre Cool (Frank Edwin Wright III).

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I appreciate and admire Billie Joe Armstrong, as a person, a creator, and a catalyst, but in case I've never said it clearly before, I'll say it now: Billie Joe Armstrong may be the lead guitarist, lead singer, the lyricist, and the melody writer, but the three men together, make Green Day. Any other combination, Green Day would not exist. I am not a musician, but I can hear the difference. Mike Dirnt is an acknowledged genius with the bass, and Tre Cool plays the drums with the expression of any other instrument; he doesn't just keep a background rhythm, his contribution is integral to the dream. Together, they evoke emotion, and instigate catharsis. As a group, they've had their rough spots, but if you look for it, when they glance in each other's direction, you can see the brotherly love shining in their eyes; their long time history and friendship has to make a difference in their success. (Though I do have to wonder how the other two men are feeling with the latest album release, where Billie Joe makes the front cover of every music magazine, and they are usually relegated to the inside pages.)

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Click on the labels below this post for more of my articles about Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day, the song writing process, 21st Century Breakdown, and my Gwinnett Arena Green Day concert experience.

Sing Us A Song For Me: Billie Joe Armstrong shifts point-of-view to great effect.

Billie Joe Armstrong

NME Magazine

June 6, 2009

Interview Excerpt

Someone searched on the phrase: poetic techniques in the song 21 guns by greenday. At the time, I had no answer for them, but they found my site, anniekwrites, through the key words in the search. They stayed for a minute or two, and maybe clicked the link to hear the song in a live performance. It got me thinking about impressions I’d already gleaned, pertinent for the writer, any writer, of prose, poetry, or song lyrics. Billie Joe Armstrong breaks the rule; he shifts his point of view.

One minute he’s in third person, the next it’s first, or it’s the second person, “you,” or the understood you, as in a command, sometimes all in the same song, or in the same sentence, and there are the layered elements of tone, narrator reliability, and distance. And nobody minds it, because it makes you feel included, and he readily admits, every song he writes, from a male or a female perspective, starting with the multiple points of view expressed in the concept album American Idiot, and continuing with 21st Century Breakdown, with its two major characters, is him. Often, when he uses the second person “you,” it’s almost like he’s talking to himself.


In the June 6, 2009 British music magazine, NME, Billie Joe Armstrong is interviewed by Hardeep Phull. On page 10, Phull asks Armstrong:

The characters on 21st Century Breakdown are extensions of you, aren’t they?

“I think it’s 100% me. It’s just different names. Those songs could be ‘Billie’s Inferno’ or ‘Viva La Billie Joe’ (laughs). The character thing came almost by accident during recording. There’s a yin/yang element to them- it’s a little bit schizophrenic in a lot of ways.”

Doesn’t that worry you - that you’ve written an album that’s 100 percent you and yet it’s two different people?
“Yeah, and one’s a man and one’s a woman! What does that say (laughs)? I think it’s more down to creativity. When you put names and characters to it, it gives it flesh and blood… it means so much more than if the songs were all obviously me.”


Whether he knows it or not, Billie Joe Armstrong works to achieve what all good writers do: to translate his personal visions and demons onto the page through his characters, so that every word is accessible, without compromise, and essential to the piece.

Because of its emotional content and lyrical melody, the song, 21 Guns, is one of my favorites on 21st Century Breakdown, but it is not the best constructed of the songs in terms of poetic technique. In 21 Guns, Armstrong asks a series of questions and gives the listener an answer. This is an example from the third stanza and then the repeating refrain:

Did you try to live on your own
When you burned down the house and home
Did you stand too close to the fire?
Like a liar looking for forgiveness from a stone

(incredible musical interlude, before powerful refrain)

One, 21 guns
Lay down your arms
Give up the fight
One, 21 guns
Throw up your arms into the sky
You and I

The “You and I.” That’s when you learn he’s talking about a version of himself, and not an abstract concept. That’s why I call 21 Guns a song about relationships.

In the closing stanza before the final refrain, Armstrong starts out in the second person “you,” and in the third line, brings in the concept of the first person, “I.”

When it’s time to live and let die
And you can’t get another try
Something inside this heart has died
You’re in ruins.

Of course, you could consider it as a discourse, where he’s interjecting, as a third person omniscient observer, “Something inside this heart has died,” but I prefer to think of it in a first person context, and that he’s talking about his own heart. But, then, why doesn't he say "my heart"? (Because he wants you to feel included, the mark of a master writer, the ability to convince the listener to identify with the characters. And he wants you to know he's been in the same place, emotionally, so you can identify with him, the performer.)

(And if I haven’t thoroughly confused you yet, Green Day fan or bewildered reader, just remember, this is only my opinion, not a critical analysis. I write prose and poetry, but sadly, I was never an English major.)

When I was a ninth grade student, we were asked to analyze Paul Simon’s lyrics in songs like Sounds of Silence and Like A Rock. I still have that essay somewhere. It was a useful exercise, not because I learned to analyze the construction of the songs as poetry, but it gave me the opportunity to think about what the songs meant to me, and what I thought the first person character in I Am A Rock was really feeling when he said, “and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.” (I got an “A” on the essay.)

Ultimately, what a song (or a story or a poem) means to you is more important than any literary technique. But, as a choice from 21st Century Breakdown, 21 Guns is probably about the only song on there you could analyze for a high school class, though the title song from the album is probably the most ambitious in terms of technique.

Poetic technique in 21 Guns? There’s some slanted rhyming going on. There’s a stanza structure and a refrain. Lines repeat for emphasis. But the power of the song is in its performance. The words and the melody and the voice are ready companions, and there is no reason they should stand alone. Sung and played in the Key of F, in every note of 21 Guns, there is emotion and there is resonance.

© 2009 Annie King

Green Day, MTV Video Music Awards, and Raunch

Green Day's energized performance at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards rescued the broadcast. I’ve written before about how I identify with the emotion in Billie Joe Armstrong’s songs, even though the details of my life bear no relation. He doesn’t celebrate drug use; he chronicles its devastating effects. He uses the “f” word as an expletive, not as a euphemism for sex. In his songs, he respects women, and he idolizes the concepts of idealism, political awareness, and romantic love. His songs ask questions more than they offer solutions. He doesn’t tell you what to do; he just wants to make you aware there’s a problem, and that not everyone thinks or believes the same thing.

Thus, he’s written songs like East Jesus Nowhere, in which he indicts organized religion and tele-evangelism (as he would probably say, the song is not anti-God, it’s anti-hypocrisy), and yes, the lyrics are rough, but the song is actually fun. All of his songs are pop punk rock driven, drawing more than ever from classic rock and stadium rock traditions, best appreciated after repeated plays, when the melodies, vocals, instrumentation, and rhythm changes are drummed into your head.

(In case I’ve given the impression I recommend Green Day and Billie Joe Armstrong’s songs to every listener, I want to make it clear, I don’t blindly recommend their songs or their concerts for children or preteens, not without parental guidance.** I don’t necessarily recommend them for younger to mid teens, unless they already became aware of Green Day as ten year olds with the release of American Idiot and songs like Boulevard of Broken Dreams, in which case there’s no stopping them. I also don’t recommend Green Day for adults who are sensitive to strong lyrics, or for adults who don’t agree that George Bush and his ilk were the worst thing that ever happened to our country, and that to be an American is to be an individual and to question authority. )

Green Day performed East Jesus Nowhere at the MTV VMA awards. It was an inspired performance. For anyone who caught the North American leg of their 21st Century Breakdown concert tour, you know its intent was to capture the energy of a concert performance, and it mostly succeeded, culminating with bringing hundreds of people up on stage. My husband and I called my son in from his homework to watch it, and we thoroughly enjoyed the antics: Armstrong going out into the audience and Security chasing him back, Armstrong playing his guitar behind his head…

The rest of the MTV VMA awards? We don’t ordinarily watch them. I know we are not a part of the target audience, but still, doesn’t anybody out there agree, the British MC (and I won’t even bother looking up his name or giving him the credit) was crude, tasteless, sexist, and above all- not funny. Whenever cameras panned to the crowd, after yet another, and another, and another lewd joke, at Lady Gaga’s expense, and later, even Beyonce and Taylor Swift, not a single celebrity was smiling. If I were Lady Gaga, I’d have considered stomping the man’s head and crushing his skull with a spiked heel. (Sorry- I digress.) I’m just glad, for the rest of the show, my son was out of the room. So, he missed the MC’s total disregard for women and their feelings. He missed Kanye West stealing the moment from nineteen year old Taylor Swift.

Back to Green Day. In the 8-20-09 issue of Rolling Stone, Billie Joe Armstrong is quoted as making a crude joke about a dog, telling it to the band and crew an hour before a concert. But that joke is not derogatory toward women, and what it’s really saying (if you want to analyze something so silly) is: Give them what they want, make sure they leave satisfied. In his concerts, his “on-stage” patter can be unusual, and his antics during Shout and King for a Day are designed to be raunchy. He must get some kind of exhibitionist thrill from mooning every audience (actually a partial moon, or a "moon peek" during King for a Day) or he wouldn’t still be doing it. But I realize now, why, as a parent, I “forgive him.” None of it is meant to hurt anybody, and none of it is degrading. (As a parent, my biggest concern is Armstrong and his band mates references to drinking.) His concerts are a celebration and an inspiration, and his songs, despite the anguish and the sometimes horrifying lyrics (as he has termed them), are predominantly about hope and courage and love, and those are good themes for everybody.

** So, can I recommend Billie Joe Armstrong’s songs for younger children, after all? If you pre-select the songs (and there are many that are beautiful and inspiring), and you explain a whole lot of things before and after a concert, Green Day (according to band mythology, named when they were seventeen years old after a “good day” of smoking marijuana and/or a reference to a Sesame Street episode with Ernie), has something to offer everybody. Choose wisely.

Billie Joe Armstrong

5 Years Old in 1979

32 Years Old in 2004

"Fair Use" Image

from: Nobody Likes You

by Marc Spitz

(Hyperion, 2006)

(What were they named before they became Green Day? Sweet Children. Where did Billie Joe Armstrong perform, singing songs from musicals, when he was still a young teen, wearing a white shirt, black pants and a tie? At nursing homes, for elderly residents. Who scolded him about his Woodstock 1994 performance, after he ate the mud clods slung at him by an energized crowd, and dropped his pants? His mother. How many times did they have to bleep Billie Joe Armstrong at the VMA when he sang East Jesus Nowhere? Twice. How many times did they bleep Jay-Z? Every fourth word. What does Armstrong say he regrets most about his life? Not demanding from his teachers a good education.)

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For another delightful perspective about the Gwinnett Arena Green Day concert, there's a blog entry from Access Atlanta's Atlanta Music Scene: Green Day Party Bridges Generations. It did feel like a party, and from what I observed, every "kid" from child to grandparent, had a great time. I know it's something my husband, son and I will always remember as an amazing event, and we experienced it together. Is Green Day for kids? (At every concert, there are kids everywhere!) Let's leave it up to parental guidance.

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Click on the labels below this post for more about Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day, the Song Writing Process, 21st Century Breakdown, and Green Day at Gwinnett Arena.

Green Day and the Song Writing Process

Billie Joe Armstrong

Cover Shot

Guitar World - August 2009

Billie Joe Armstrong

Cover Shot

Guitar Player - November 2009

For two great articles about Billie Joe Armstrong and the Song Writing Process, I recommend the August 2009 issue of Guitar World, and the November 2009 issue of Guitar Player. Both feature interviews with Billie Joe Armstrong, emphasizing his approach to writing the songs for 21st Century Breakdown. Both give a perspective on the history of Green Day and their music. In addition, Guitar World includes the BASS lines for the song, Know Your Enemy, and a feature on the guitars and the equipment Billie Joe Armstrong uses on stage and when he's recording. Guitar Player has an interview with Jason White and how he came to play with Green Day in their live performances. For the musician interested in learning and performing their songs, or for the serious Green Day fan, these articles are among the best. Note Armstrong's guitar on the cover of Guitar Player. It is his beloved "Blue," the first guitar his mother struggled to buy for him when he was only ten years old.

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Click on the labels below this post to read my other articles about Green Day, Billie Joe Armstrong, 21st Century Breakdown, and the Song Writing Process.

Billie Joe and the (Song) Writing Process

Green Day’s new album, 21st Century Breakdown, makes me love Billie Joe Armstrong all the more, the vulnerable man, the rebel, the dreamer, the defiled. One of the songs, Before the Lobotomy, clearly, relates to his father’s death and the reversal of his happy childhood. Certain songs stick in my mind, Viva La Gloria, and 21 Guns among them. This album is not American Idiot; I won’t call it better or worse, just different. The more times you listen to the rock opera, the more the music grows, and the lyrics and emotional impact expand. Like Idiot, listening to 21st Century Breakdown is an experience. And the range and perfection of Armstrong’s singing voice is increased.

PREMIERE PERFORMANCE

21ST CENTURY BREAKDOWN

OAKLAND, CA - 4-14-09

My husband suspects he’s spent some of the five years since Idiot taking singing lessons, improving what was already impressive. All I know is my concerns about the production of his voice on the album were erased with Armstrong’s flawless performance of the difficult 21 Guns during Green Day’s live performance, May 16th, on Saturday Night Live, and his masterful crowd energizing live performance, May 22nd, on Good Morning America. Armstrong looks happy and healthy, and the stage is where he claims to feel the best.

ROLLING STONE - ISSUE 1079 - 5-28-09

There’s a great new article in the May 28, 2009 issue of Rolling Stone, where Armstrong talks about the insecurity that goes along with writing his songs: “You can scare yourself with ambition- having the audacity to want to be as good as John Lennon or Paul McCartney… There has been so much great shit before me that I feel like a student… But you have to battle past that… If you’re at that place where you’ve been working hard but don’t feel like you know what you’re doing anymore, then you’re onto something.”

STUDIO SHOT - 21ST CENTURY BREAKDOWN

So, I guess Armstrong’s words of encouragement give me permission to keep writing my several novels-in-progress to completion, even when I’m not sure what I’m doing, or how the final draft will ultimately shine. On the other hand, in the Rolling Stone article Armstrong also says, “I’ve been consumed. I tell my wife, ‘Sorry that for the last 15 years all I’ve talked about is being in a rock band.’”

BILLIE JOE, AND WIFE, ADRIENNE ARMSTRONG

And he has concerns about what his children will think of his lyrics: “I like painting an ugly picture. I get something uplifting out of singing some of the most horrifying shit you can sing about.” He smiles. “It’s just my DNA.” About his 14 year old son, Joseph, listening to the new album: “I want to make sure ‘Christian’s Inferno’ (song title) isn’t going on in my house. I don’t think he understands everything that’s going on in there… But in the next few years, he’s definitely going to do some investigating.”

ADRIENNE AND BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG

Songwriting, or novel writing- our insecurities about our talent, our desire for connection, our worries about the time taken away from our relationships, and our concerns about revealing too much about our demons or our hopes- is much the same, it seems.

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My Secret Crush

I’m in love with Billie Joe Armstrong. There, I’ve said it. Not the man, I don’t know the man, but the man he represents in my mind. I’ve written about him before, though I kept his identity hidden.

If you don’t know his music, you may remember the uncharacteristic ballad, The Time of Your Life, also known as Good Riddance, written by Armstrong and performed by Green Day, played at the end of the closing credits for the final performance of the TV show, Seinfeld. Or you may know him from the successful rock opera album, American Idiot. He has been my inspiration for three-novels-in-progress (one realistic and two speculative fantasy), one lengthy short story, one play, and what I call a “character study” poem.

How can all of these men have black hair and green eyes? How can they all be strong, flawed, yet achingly vulnerable? How can they all share the same face, and yet have different back stories, different patterns of speech, and different ways of functioning and moving about in this world (well, the worlds of their stories). How can they all have the body of another man who shall remain nameless, because I can’t remember his name, the athletic, muscled body of a gymnast (unlike the real man, I suspect, though during the American Idiot tour, at 33 years old, Billie Joe Armstrong, lean and dynamic, was in his prime; and at 37, he's fit for the next). How can they all have a voice, diction, and mannerisms, completely different from the real man (except when he’s performing on a stage)?

My husband and I became interested in Green Day, after hearing the song, and then the rock opera theme album, American Idiot, during some of the worst days of the Bush administration (weren’t they all the worst days?) after 9-11 and the “war” had been declared. We never listened to Green Day in 1994, when they became famous for songs such as Basket Case and Longview and When I Come Around, focusing on teenage angst. We had never heard of them, and had nothing in common with them, or so we would have thought, those “boys” of 21 and 22 years old, and in 1994, I was busy giving birth to my son, then nursing him through traction and then surgery for dislocated hips. In 1994, what did we know about “dookie” except for changing diapers?

Grammy Award, Best Alternative Performance, 1994

August 26th, 2005, right after Hurricane Katrina buzzed South Florida with a near miss (and no one knew yet the horrors it would cause New Orleans), to celebrate our wedding anniversary, my husband and I saw Green Day perform at a terrible venue, then called The Bank Atlantic Center (coincidentally the same venue where we heard Barack Obama speak while he was running for president, generating the same energy as a rock concert). After Katrina, we were one of the lucky ones, with power and air conditioning. The roads were clear, and a friend without electricity came to our house to stay with our son, then eleven years old.

My husband and I sat in our rafter seats, as far from the stage as a body could get, trading a pair of Leica binoculars, when we both became mesmerized, energized, couldn’t stay in one place, singing the words at full volume, as Billie Joe Armstrong took control of the audience. (If you’ve ever seen the DVD, Bullet in A Bible, of Green Day’s concert at Milton Keynes in England, performing in front of 130,000 faithful fans, you’ll know what I mean.) And, I became aware, that this man, for a man, is near as small as me. (By some accounts he is 5’4’’ tall and I am 4’10”, about the height of his wife.) He stood on boxes, he jumped, he gyrated, he ran across the stage, challenging the apron, and he admonished the hungry audience to roar.

Because of the hurricane, the audience was down by a half, but he, and Mike Dirnt (Mike Pritchard) the bassist, and Tre Cool (Frank Edwin Wright), the drummer, friends and band members since they were twelve and thirteen, played as if they were at Milton Keynes. And that is what I have read about them. From the time they were teens, playing to an audience of five, or fifty, or twenty-five, they played their hearts out, like the Beatles at Shea Stadium. And that is what we witnessed, what impressed us, that these men gave their performance 6,000%, and they wanted to connect with their audience, and give them the best experience they could possibly share.

For American Idiot, Billie Joe Armstrong wrote Wake Me Up When September Ends, about his father dying when he was ten years old. So, even though Green Day allowed a video of the song to become an emblem for loved ones separated by the Iraq War, don’t you believe that when you hear Armstrong sing the song. He’s singing for his father, he’s singing for himself. When you know that, and hear it, you can feel it in his voice, you can see it in his face. He writes virtually all of Green Day’s songs, and just like my poems, most of his songs are inspired by autobiography, even if the details change in the rendering.

Do I have anything in common with the details of his life? No. I’ve never been on drugs. I don't smoke. I’ve never been an alcoholic and gone to rehab. I’ve never been a young child who lost a parent. I don’t have a single tattoo. I’ve never been the youngest of six siblings (though I am the 4th of 5). I’ve never been a pop punk rock star. Can I relate to the emotions he portrays in his music?: Self-Doubt, Disillusionment with Government, The Desire for Fulfillment, Love, Anxiety, Hope, Knowing You’re On the Cusp of Something Grand but It Just Hasn’t Happened Yet.

Well, it happened in 2004, for him and his group, with the release of American Idiot, when he won the Grammy for Best Rock Album, and in 2005, Record of the Year, for Boulevard of Broken Dreams. And now they have a new album coming out in May 2009: 21st Century Breakdown, reviewed favorably by Rolling Stone. I hope he succeeds with this album, and in the tour that accompanies it, or I will personally “ache” for him. (Armstrong, and his bassist, Mike Dirnt, came from hardship and poverty, and for their perseverance, I can also admire the members of Green Day.)

One of my favorite Armstrong songs appears on Warning (Reprise, 2004), a lesser known album with acoustic influences, panned by some of his punk rock fans. The song is called Waiting, and there is an upbeat video to match it. Amazingly, the song is a cross between Mary Tyler Moore’s optimism in the intro to her ancient show where she lands a job at a TV station and throws her hat in the air, and Petula Clark’s performance of the song, Downtown. And here is an excerpt of his song: “I’ve been, waiting a long time, for this moment to come. I’m destined for anything…at all... Downtown, lights will be shining, on me like a new diamond, ring out under the midnight hour. I’m so much closer than I have ever known…Good luck, you’re gonna need it, where I’m going, if I get there at all.” The words are simple. It’s the melody, Armstrong’s singing voice, the bass and drum line, and the pure passion, that makes the song live.

Above all, I relate to the emotion in Billie Joe Armstrong’s songs and in his voice when he sings them, accessible, energetic, and lyrical. In 2006, at a pre-game show in New Orleans to officially re-open the Lousiana Superdome, Armstrong had the pleasure (I’m sure he would term it in this way, though I do not know him) to share a stage with Bono of U2, doing a duet with Bono of The Saints Come Marching, a single for Music Rising to benefit musicians in New Orleans.

When he is quoted, Armstrong doesn’t have Bono’s silver tongue, and it is obvious he is not as well read. He dropped out of high school, and by all accounts, never sought a higher education. But you can’t do what he does without being intelligent. I sometimes wonder how his lyrics would soar, if he’d ever expanded his horizons, but what anyone can relate to is what he’s been through in his life. Who hasn’t experienced a sense of loss and betrayal of trust? Who hasn’t wished for something more?

Armstrong has been married to his wife, Adrienne, for fifteen years. The day after they married, they found out they were pregnant with their first son, born just a year younger than my son, in 1995. A few years ago, when his son was twelve, Armstrong was quoted (in an article I can’t locate) as saying, in effect, what can his son possibly do to rebel, considering he’s the father. (By all accounts, Armstrong is a good father, but his point was, I dropped out of school, I’ve done the drugs, I've got the tattoos and the crazy hair…)

Armstrong may not be the perfect role model for my son. But he is a role model for me: giving 6,000 %, believing in yourself, learning from your mistakes, and sharing your life in ways that matter. It’s not his performance at the live concert I saw that inspires me to write the characters that look like him. It’s not reading about his life. I wrote my first story involving a character with his face after looking into his eyes and expressive (air brushed) face on this cover of Rolling Stone:

Rolling Stone, Issue 987, November 17, 2005

If I get stuck writing a story involving characters inspired by Armstrong, I just look at his image on my opening computer screen, and gaze into those green eyes. I may not know what my character will do next; but I know how my character is feeling, and how my female lead feels about him.

Of the three novels-in-progress, featuring a variation on the themes of alienation, indomitable spirit, and the redeeming power of relationships, the one that will be published is the one I finish first (so that I’ll just have to give the male character a radical makeover in the novel I finish second). He is not the only main character; there is always a flawed and innately powerful young woman, equally challenged by potentially crippling circumstance. I know the story I finish first will be good because I won’t submit a completed manuscript to any publisher or agent until I’ve given the book my 6,000%.