Songs: New Green Day x Three

Green Day has been a force in music for more than 30 years, if you can believe it, and it’s been more than 20 years since their career-defining performance of “American Idiot” at the Grammy Awards. The band has been a major force and influence, selling more than 75 million albums, spawning a Tony Award-winning musical based on their American Idiot album, winning five Grammy Awards (20 nominations), including one for the instrumental “Espionage” which was featured in the film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.

Now the band is out with Saviors, perhaps their best album in a decade, possibly thanks to the band reuniting with their former producer, Rob Cavallo, who produced Dookie and American Idiot, among other earlier works.

The band has always been uncompromising in their approach to writing lyrics and songs, and Saviors is no exception. It’s great to feel like a band is actually engaged with the times and not sitting on the sidelines, preening or pouting or having performative beefs with other artists.

Green Day sounds angry again.

Saviors was nominated for Best Rock Album at this year’s Grammy Awards, and the song “Dilemma” and “The American Dream is Killing Me” were also nominated in song categories (Rock Song and Rock Performance, respectively). Shamefully, they lost two Grammys to relatively ancient bands — the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. (And this was the Rolling Stones using Auto-tune.)

In trying to pick a song to feature, I boiled it down to three choices: “Susie Chapstick,” “Strange Days Are Here to Stay,” and “Living in the ’20s.”

Then, I remembered that I don’t have to choose — I can present all three, and you can choose.

I will feature the lyrics from “Strange Days Are Here to Stay,” however, to give you a taste of how withering and snarky Green Day remains:

Strange days are here to stay
Ever since Bowie died
It hasn’t been the same
All the madmen going mental
Grandma’s on the fentanyl now
Strange days are here to stay

Well, this is how the world will end
When superheroes play pretend
They promised us forever
But we got less

It’s the return of the blob
And Jesus gonna quit his job
He promised us forever
But we got less

These are the best of times
Twisted and borrowed times
These are the loneliest of times

Strange days are here to stay
Everyone is racist
And the Uber’s running late

So, here for your listening pleasure are three songs from an album that I’d recommend whole-heartedly.

Enjoy!