Rock
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Bon Jovi rocked launched to fame in the era when rock stars still toured the world in jumbo jets with the band’s name painted on the side. Four decades after the group’s inception, most people can name at least one Bon Jovi song, with the band clocking 10 Hot 100 Top 10 hits — including four No. 1s — during its still-ongoing run. With its culture-permeating anthems, the fame, the money, the analogous excesses they generated and the comedically big hair, the band helped forge the archetype for ’80s (and ’90s and early ’00s) rock megafame.
Talking to Billboard over Zoom from a white-walled room somewhere in New Jersey, you get the sense that there’s at least one part of this heyday Jon Bon Jovi wishes he could return to.
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“When I can do two-and-a-half hours a night, four nights a week and not think about it — the way that I did for the first 30 years of our career — then I’ll say, ‘Sure, I’d love the opportunity,’” says the group’s frontman, still a dreamboat at 62.
The opportunity in question in touring. On the precipice of releasing its 16th studio album, Forever, Bon Jovi isn’t sure they’ll hit the road behind the album, out June 7. The wildcard element is JBJ’s voice, the same one that implored us to live for the fight when that’s all that we’ve got on “Living on a Prayer,” and melted a billion hearts on “Bed of Roses” — and which has been under heavy repair since the vocal difficulties Bon Jovi has experienced for years necessitated a major vocal chord surgery in the summer of 2022. The procedure left him unsure if he’d ever be able to sing about going down in a blaze of glory, or living while he’s alive, or anything at all, ever again.
This issue isn’t what the band’s new documentary, Thank You, Goodnight was intended to be about. The stakes, however, became quickly apparent to director Gotham Chopra when he started filming a few years back.
“The more time I spent with Jon, I was like, ‘So wait, what’s going on with your voice?’” Chopra says over Zoom. “Jon said he’d been struggling with it for a couple of years, and didn’t know what was going to happen — because the shows we were filming might be the end of the line — but that that wasn’t for the documentary.”
“I was like, ‘Oh no,” Chopra continues. “That’s for the documentary. It’s really important. Everything you’ve built across 40 years hangs in the balance.”
This narrative thus became the through line of the four-part documentary, premiering tomorrow (April 26) on Hulu. Helmed by Chopra, whose previous work includes the 2021 Tom Brady docuseries Man in the Arena, the Bon Jovi project was one, Chopra says, “where nothing was off limits.” It unpacks the Bon Jovi story from its earliest days in Bon Jovi’s native Sayreville, New Jersey to the arena-rock juggernaut of the Slippery When Wet era to the band’s lineup changes — to Jon Bon Jovi scanning his neck with specialized lasers in an attempt to shore up his voice. Interview subjects include the band (Jon Bon Jovi, keyboardist David Brian, dummer Tico Torres and newer members Hugh McDonald, Phil X and Everett Bradley), along with former manager Doc McGhee, songwriter Desmond Child, good pal Bruce Springsteen and Richie Sambora, the guitar-wielding yin to Jon Bon Jovi’s yang, who left the group in 2013.
“Obviously early on, I was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got to get Richie Sambora. We can’t do this without Richie’,” Chopra recalls, “Jon was like, ‘Oh, yeah, you gotta get Richie Sambora. You can’t do this without him.’”
With Sambora’s departure serving as one of the documentary’s central tensions, Chopra — who interviewed each person involved in the film separately — eventually even captured an onscreen apology from the guitarist.
“In the film he says, ‘I don’t regret doing it. I regret the way I did do it; I apologize to the guys for that,’” recalls Chopra. “I think the guys and Jon were pretty affected by that… All of these things become an act of therapy in some ways.”
So too was it an exercise in vulnerability — with Bon Jovi allowing Chopra to film his voice issues even in their toughest moments. In one scene, he gets off stage after a show thinking he sounded pretty good and is then informed otherwise by his wife.
“What he was going through wasn’t easy,” says Chopra. “There were times on that tour when he was struggling, and he was in his dressing room, and he’d be like, ‘get the f–k out of my room’ and I’d get the f–k out of his room — then gradually find my way back in after five or 10 minutes.”
This level of intimacy, along with frank, often funny and frequently poignant interviews (in the last episode Bon Jovi gets choked up about his love of songwriting) and a barrage of archival footage, combines to offer a film that even hardcore Bon Jovi fans will likely learn something from. Here, Jon Bon Jovi and Torres discuss the documentary, as well as the future of the band.
Jon, the film’s director Gotham Chopra mentioned that there were times where he was filming and you didn’t necessarily want him in the room. How vulnerable was the documentary experience?
Jon: We had trust him as the director in order to get what we wanted, which was the truth. One thing we all agreed upon, on day one, was we didn’t want a vanity piece. [We wanted] to tell the honest-to-God ups and downs of life behind the curtain. Nobody anticipated the health issues with me, and so that was the wild card in this. But I trusted him.
Tico: Gotham is a very spiritual person, and after a while you forget he’s there. But his questions are very spiritual in nature, and somehow he opens you up to be honest with yourself. You don’t find that in regular interviews.
Jon, so much of documentary focuses on this narrative about your voice. What was it like during this uncertain time, to also be bearing it to the camera?
Jon: Like I said, right after [Gotham] came on board, and I said, “I trust you to capture this,” there was no decision — because there couldn’t be anything other than, “You have to capture everything.”
The surgery was nearly two years ago, and obviously you’ve recorded an album since undergoing it. How are you feeling now?
Jon: There is still uncertainty about the outcome 22 months after the surgery, although I’m optimistic. And for the record, I can say — because now I’m speaking to press and need to clarify — I’m very capable of singing again. It’s just that the bar for us is two-and-a-half hours a night, four nights a week. I have to get to that level again before we’ll tour. So being vulnerable I was never afraid of. Sharing it now with the public, it’s out of my control, because that’s what we all signed up for. And like T said, Gotham has a kind of spiritual approach to things, so it was never combative. I trusted him.
Tico: It was difficult for the band. To see one of your brothers suffering and going through something, and he’s the hardest working guy there is. Every day he works hard to get back. Right after the operation, speaking to him, once he could speak, he sounded way lower [in register] than me. And we’re a band, so we worry about each other. I think the fact that the documentary was capturing that as well is important. Because we’re in it together. We’re gonna back him up no matter what.
Gotham took the approach of interviewing everyone separately. What was it like to finally see Richie’s footage?
Jon: I don’t know. It was… He was honest. And you could see that he had things to deal with. And I hope it clarifies for the viewer that there was never a fight, and it was never about any issues of money or anything like that. He literally was having substance issues, anxiety issues, single dad issues, and just chose then not to come back. As he says in the film, how he did it, he apologizes for now. But you’ve got a band on a stage; you’ve got 120 roadies that are counting on income; you have millions of people who bought tickets. You gotta go to work, you know? These are big-boy decisions, and big boys have to go to work.
What was it like getting an apology from him?
Jon: I don’t need an apology… I don’t need an apology. It’s not about that.
Tico: Remember, you’re a band. We grew up together. And like I said before, when somebody’s hurting, you care about him… Alec as well, our beloved bass player, when he left, it’s a void. And you know he passed away just a couple of years ago. It’s family. It does affect you. As a whole, it affects us. There’s a comeback from that. I think the writing process and the recording process as a band helps you get that out, because it’s emotion.
Jon, in the doc you say that in the Slippery When Wet era, the band had found another rung of the ladder to climb, and obviously there was much more to go after that. Given everything you’ve done, do you see more rungs for Bon Jovi? Where is there left to go?
Jon: It’s not about numbers at all. I would love the opportunity to be whole, so that when we would go out on that stage, we could do those 18 albums and pick any song I want throughout that catalog on a nightly basis, the way I used to be able to do. That’s where I have left to go. When we’ve done those kind of shows… when we opened the O2 Arena in London and we did 12 or 15 nights, and we did 90 different songs over the course of the nights — that’s the bar that I need to get back to.
What are your current daily practices for getting yourself back to that place?
Jon: Hoping, wishing. Wishing, hoping. Praying. There’s a lot of vocal therapy, at least four times a week. There are considerations about whether it’s mineral or dietary and exercise stuff, but it really comes back to vocal therapy to just try to strengthen something that, you’ve got to remember, is only as big as your thumbnail. [He holds up his thumb to the camera.] The vocal chord is only that big. It’s really up to God at this point.
There’s some great unheard music in the documentary — I’m specifically thinking of a song called “Cadillac Man” that you wrote for the 1990 Robin Williams movie of the same name. Is there a chance that any of this archival music gets released?
Jon: Yes. One thing that we have always known, and our deep fan base knows as well, is that we always write 30 songs to get 10. And so there’s always been a backlog of material that’s been unreleased. There’s no shortage of it. So I think that we stumbled on 30 or 40 songs that no one’s heard, and they’ll all come out, yeah.
So we get new music from the Slippery When Wet heyday era Bon Jovi?
Jon: Slippery When Wet, New Jersey, Keep the Faith. All the records.
Is there a timeline for that?
Jon: No. No one’s actually even addressed it with me yet. The archiving was still going on simultaneously to the mastering and the album cover and the video and all that kind of stuff… But we know what we’ve got. It’ll happen during the course of the release of the album.
That’s incredibly exciting.
Jon: Yeah, there’s some really good songs that I can’t believe didn’t make those records.
Jon, there’s this great moment in the documentary when you share about going for long car rides with Bruce Springsteen, and you both leaving your phones at home and just driving around New Jersey and talking. What can you tell us about the last drive?
Jon: I’ve been blessed to have had [Bruce] and [fellow New Jersey musical influence] Southside [Johnny] be good friends to me throughout, and even before there was a band. But [Bruce] and I will take these drives now — and he was so incredibly supportive during [the voice issues] and throughout the process of healing, where I couldn’t even talk, you know? We would take these 100-mile drives, just the two of us in the car, no radio, nobody. We’d just drive and talk about things that truthfully, you know, how many guys can I talk to about that level of stuff? And how many guys can he talk to about that level of stuff?
Yeah, not too many.
So yeah, we often do it, and it’s some of my most treasured memories. People have seen us along the way. The first five, six, seven times, nobody would have known. But then this time we went for an ice cream cone, or this time we went for a drink, or this time we were stopped at a light. So the sightings of Sasquatch have happened. [Laughs.]
I was also struck by the part of the doc where you were all talking about what your success could afford you in terms of spending one-upmanship. Like, “You bought me a car? I’m going to buy you two cars” or “We need 16 pinball machines on this tour.” Is there one extravagance from those days that sticks out to you?
Jon: There was silliness. There were absolutely cars and art and toys — because you could, and we took full advantage of it.
Through documentary you all got to review 40 years of your own personal style. Was there one look from each of yourselves that made you think, “Oh my God, I looked amazing”?
Jon: No, I take the opposite. My baby pictures were public, yours were not. We still have to suffer some of those looks. It could have been worse, but you know, some of those baby pictures were tough to look at.
Tico: I mean, if you take the clothes away, we definitely were better looking and younger. But the clothing was much to be desired. Even the haircuts were a little like, “I wish we didn’t do that.”
Some of that style has come back around though.
Jon: Oh, yes. You sit around now your kids and you go, “Those torn jeans? Let me tell you where all this stuff comes from that you’re doing.” When I see parachute pants and Capezios come back though, I’m running for the hills. [Laughs.]
Jon, there are a few moments in the documentary when you talk about finding joy and how that was hard to do while you were really struggling with your voice. Where are you both finding joy these days?
Tico: I think we’re living the joy now. Jon’s been through a lot, and of course everybody goes through that pain with him. The joy is the revival. Doing a record together is cleansing. Jon’s lyrics — and I’m not a lyricist; I don’t listen to lyrics — but this is one of the few records where I listen to every one of them, because they just grabbed me. There was a lot of joy in making this record. I think we’re enjoying it. Jon, what do you think?
Jon: Well, we are. I’ll give you a great example: when we’re at these rehearsals and we’re just marking the progress that I’m making on a monthly basis. There’s no miracles, but when I look around the room and not once does the band sit there and go, “I don’t want to be here.” Or “I don’t want to play that song again.” That to me is love on a whole other level.
We know we’re not going out on the road tomorrow. We know we’re not being paid to sit in this rehearsal space. But the guys are like, “Of course I’ll be there. Let’s go. Let’s do it again.” Or if I crash and burn, they go, “Okay, I traveled all this way and we played an hour before I’ve gotta cool it.” Nobody has cursed me for it. They’re like, “We’re with you.” That’s the love of family and band and brotherhood that no presents, no cars, no art, no silly kids’ stuff could ever, ever replace.
Hozier doesn’t just have his first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 – he’s also topping Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart for the first time, as “Too Sweet” lifts to the summit of the April 27-dated survey.
“Too Sweet” reigns with 35.6 million official U.S. streams accumulated April 12-18, according to Luminate.
Though that’s a drop from the previous frame’s count of 36.7 million listens April 5-11 (the song’s top single-week sum to date), the song rules thanks to a more precipitous drop for the previous No. 1, Future, Metro Boomin and Kendrick Lamar‘s “Like That.” While “Too Sweet” drops 3%, “Like That” plummets 13% to 34.8 million streams April 12-18.
“Too Sweet” marks Hozier’s first No. 1 on Streaming Songs, which began in 2013. “Take Me to Church” had been his previous best, peaking at No. 2 in 2015.
Between “Take Me to Church” and “Too Sweet,” he had an additional appearance on the ranking in the form of Noah Kahan’s “Northern Attitude,” on which he’s featured via the song’s late-2023 redo; the track reached No. 23 last November.
Concurrently, “Too Sweet” rules Rock Streaming Songs and Alternative Streaming Songs for a fourth week each after debuting atop both tallies dated April 6.
As previously reported, “Too Sweet” takes over No. 1 on the multimetric Hot 100, also Hozier’s first ruler, surpassing the No. 2 peak of “Take Me to Church.” It has reigned on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs for all four frames since its debut.
The multiformat radio hit continues to climb multiple rankings; its peaks so far include No. 13 on Adult Alternative Airplay, No. 20 on Rock & Alternative Airplay, No. 23 on both Pop Airplay and Adult Pop Airplay and No. 26 on Alternative Airplay.
“Too Sweet” is featured on Unheard, a four-song EP featuring leftover tracks from the singer-songwriter’s 2023 album Unreal Unearth. Premiered March 22, Unheard has earned 127,000 equivalent album units to date.
Mike Pinder, the last surviving original member of psychedelic rock of 1960s/70s prog rock band the Moody Blues has died at 82. The pioneering keyboardist/singer credited with helping to introduce the mellotron into the rock arena passed away on Wednesday (April 24) at his home in Northern California of undisclosed causes.
Moody bassist John Lodge shared a statement from Pinder’s family on Facebook, in which they wrote, “Michael Thomas Pinder died on Wednesday, April 24th, 2024 at his home in Northern California, surrounded by his devoted family. Michael’s family would like to share with his trusted friends and caring fans that he passed peacefully. His final days were filled with music, encircled by the love of his family. Michael lived his life with a childlike wonder, walking a deeply introspective path which fused the mind and the heart.”
It continued, “He created his music and the message he shared with the world from this spiritually grounded place; as he always said, ‘Keep your head above the clouds, but keep your feet on the ground.’ His authentic essence lifted up everyone who came into contact with him. His lyrics, philosophy, and vision of humanity and our place in the cosmos will touch generations to come.”
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Born in Erdington, Birmingham England on Dec. 27, 1941, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Pinder co-founded the group in May 1964 with multi-instrumentalist/singer Ray Thomas, singer/guitarist Denny Laine, drummer Graeme Edge and bassist/singer Clint Warwick; Laine and Warwick left the band in 1966 after the release of 1965’s debut album, The Magnificent Moodies, and were replaced by guitarist Justin Hayward and bassist Lodge. Pinder and Laine co-wrote all the original songs on Moodies, which included the band’s wistful, R&B influenced breakthrough single, “Go Now.”
The new lineup released one of the landmark early prog rock albums, Days of Future Passed, in 1967, on which Pinder made his recorded debut playing the mellotron, a keyboard that used prerecorded three-track tapes to reproduced a variety of orchestral instrumental sounds and special effects. “The Mellotron enabled me to create my own variations of string movements. I could play any instrument that I wanted to hear in the music. If I heard strings, I could play them with the Mellotron. If I heard cello, brass, trumpets or piano, I could play them,” Pinder told Rolling Stone in an oral history of the album’s enduring hit single, “Nights in White Satin.”
Pinder took lead vocals on the majestic, symphonic opening instrumental, “The Day Begins,” and is credited with writing “Dawn: Dawn Is a Feeling” and the “Sunset” portion of the trippy “Evening” suite. The album also featured what would become the group’s signature mind-trip single, “Nights in White Satin,” which ran up to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it was re-released in 1972.
Pinder’s experimentation with the then-new keyboard helped it become a staple of prog and psychedelic recordings by groups including Yes, Genesis and King Crimson. His explorations continued on the Moody’s 1968 album In Search of the Lost Chord, another concept LP which explored the concepts of inner exploration and discovery. He contributed vocals to the propulsive single “Ride My See-Saw” and is the credited songwriter on the mind-tripping psychedelic journey through the universe “The Best Way to Travel,” featuring the acid-tinged lyrics, “Speeding through the universe/ Thinking is the best way to travel/ And you can fly, high as a kite if you want to.” He also wrote the Indian-influenced album ender “Om,” which incorporates Pinder’s mellotron, as well as sitar, tambura, tabla and cello.
The rock group that fully embraced the flower power Woodstock vibe of the late 1960s further explored the deepest recesses of their consciousness on 1969’s On the Threshold of a Dream, which again featured Pinder’s vocal contributions and songwriting on four tracks, the incense-spiced blues raga “So Deep Within You,” as well as floaty “Have You Heard (Part 1)” (and “Part 2”) and the roiling instrumental “The Voyage.”
The keyboardist would continue to be a key creative force in the band on 1969’s moon landing-inspired To Our Children’s Children’s Children album, 1970’s more straight-ahead rocking A Question of Balance — which featured the quickstep Billboard Hot 100 No. 21 hit “Question” — and 1971’s similarly concept-free Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.
The group’s 1972 LP, Seventh Sojourn, found Pinder blazing a trail with another new instrument, the Chamberlin, another electro-mechanical keyboard that also used a tape-like device that would later be featured on recordings by Stevie Wonder, James Taylor and Edgar Winter.
After a long break, the Moodys returned in 1978 with their ninth album, Octave, on which Pinder traded his mellotron and Chamberlin for synthesizers on what would be his final studio recording with the band. It featured just one track credited to Pinder, the meditative ballad “One Step Into the Light,” on which he also provides lead vocals.
Before his passing, Pinder the was the last living member of the original lineup following the death of bassist Warwick in 2004, singer/flautist Thomas in 2018, drummer Edge in 2021 and guitarist Laine in 2023. “Mike your music will last forever. Rest in peace on your travels to heaven,” Lodge wrote on Twitter. The band, including Pinder, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Pinder released his debut solo album, The Promise, on the band’s label, Threshold, in 1976, followed by a second one, Among the Stars, in 1994 and 1995’s A Planet With One Mind.
See the statement from Pinder’s family and listen to some of his contributions to the band below.
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Twenty One Pilots drummer Josh Dun makes his directorial debut in the just-released clip for the Columbus duo’s latest preview of their Clancy album, “Backslide.” The visual for the mid-tempo tune debuted on Thursday morning (April 25) and it finds singer Tyler Joseph tooling around town on his red and black BMX bike in what […]
It wasn’t the technicolor morphing cars, or the giant robot shooting lights from its eyes into the crowd. It wasn’t the lava-lamp-like oozes, or the stories-tall geometric patterns, or the hyper-detailed videography of misty mountain ranges and sun-drenched clouds.
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No, the trippiest part of Phish‘s Sphere visuals was the “You Enjoy Myself” car wash – and what immediately followed.
One of Phish’s oldest and most commonly played songs – and a frequent launchpad for improvisation throughout the revered Vermont jam band’s four-decade career – “You Enjoy Myself” is strange enough in its audio-only form. An intricately composed instrumental passage builds to an all-out scream (which audiences usually join in on) before the tension gives way to famously inscrutable lyrics (a consensus best guess for the song’s repeated line: “Wash Uffizi drive me to Firenze”) and a jam section. During an instrumental breakdown, roadies produce trampolines for singer-guitarist Trey Anastasio and bassist Mike Gordon to jump on in tandem; the song often concludes with each member of the quartet participating in an a cappella “vocal jam” – described by fan site Phish.net as “featuring spontaneous vocal improvisation, from the merely strange to the auricularly traumatic.”
Phish perform “You Enjoy Myself” at Sphere on April 19, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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During its four-night residency at the cutting-edge Las Vegas venue, however, Phish paired most of “You Enjoy Myself” with an animated visual on the venue’s 160,000-square-foot LED screen that simulated going through a massive car wash – in a vehicle alongside the band and nearly 20,000 friends. The top of a steering wheel occupied the screen’s lower left corner; suds and water streaked the screen as Phish methodically progressed through the song’s stages. And as the car exited the wash and Anastasio, Gordon, keyboardist Page McConnell and drummer Jon Fishman finally arrived at the vocal jam – one of the strangest parts of its repertoire – footage of an enormous black dog appeared on the screen.
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With the audience positioned as if it was inside the camera itself, the canine started licking the lens. For several minutes, the crowd laughed hysterically as the moment’s absurdity deepened. It was a perspective-shifting piece of immersive art that was funny, weird, and totally unique.
Phish perform “You Enjoy Myself” at Sphere on April 19, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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Before Phish’s Sphere shows, which took place April 18-21, Abigail Rosen Holmes, a longtime collaborator of the band and co-creative director of the run, told Billboard of one of the creative team’s guiding principles: “If you would do this for one of the other artists you work with, it’s probably not unique enough to be for Phish.” And while not every visual treatment across the band’s four shows felt quite that unique, many did. Phish, alongside Holmes, multimedia studio Moment Factory and the rest of its team, approached its Sphere gigs with comprehensive, detail-oriented creativity. The result: a superb four-show run that continued Phish’s career-long live inventiveness – and set the bar high for each artist preparing to play the Las Vegas venue going forward.
Across four nights and eight sets of music – featuring 68 different songs, with nary a repeat – Phish cycled through a staggering range of immersive visuals that spanned trippy abstractions to real-life footage to playful illustrations. In a SiriusXM interview during the run, Anastasio called Phish’s Sphere shows “a slight step forward in the psychedelic live jam music experience,” and naturally, many of the band’s visuals were vibrantly colored splotches, squiggles, and lines that supported its music.
Phish perform at Sphere on April 18, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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But the weekend’s most memorable visuals took the medium’s possibilities a step further. On the first night, Phish speckled Sphere’s screen with a multitude of dots to score “Sand,” and iterated that visual motif to great effect during other shows, for songs like “What’s The Use?” and “Chalk Dust Torture.” For the first night’s encore, vivid video of a barn by night in a forest, aurora borealis overhead, soundtracked the rustic “Farmhouse”; on the run’s final night, the crisply composed “Divided Sky” was paired with footage of billowing clouds, cast in the orangish-purple glow of the late afternoon sun – and, to accompany a mid-song change in tone, the image switched to grayscale.
Some of the visuals were just plain fun. For “Bathtub Gin,” hundreds of miniature swimmers rotated back and forth on floaties on an ocean’s surface. “Twist” began with a wall of dark-red loops that were quickly interspersed with an alphabet soup of letters; when the song’s “Woo!” interjection arrived, characters spelling the word shot up from the bottom of the screen. During the final night’s “Ghost,” a robot-like figure peered up above the band from the screen’s bottom – and spotlights shot from its eyes into the audience.
Phish perform at Sphere on April 18, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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And while Anastasio remarked to the Washington Post prior to the Sphere shows that we was skeptical about his own image being “800 feet high on the wall,” like Bono and The Edge during U2’s concerts at the venue, several Phish visuals were framed around the band – they just eschewed straight-ahead imagery in favor of designs that obscured, warped or refracted the musicians. During “Maze,” a tower of live video of the band split into tiny geometric shapes that repeatedly dispersed and reformed. “My Friend, My Friend” began with Sphere’s screen entirely off and a slowly rotating spotlight casting the band in silhouette against it; as the song intensified, the silhouette multiplied across the screen as the venue was drenched in eerie red lighting.
In the same way the “My Friend, My Friend” visual proved that Sphere visuals can be striking even in simplicity – especially when contrasted with other, more elaborate animations and designs – a new rig conceived by the band’s esteemed designer Chris Kuroda in tandem with Moment Factory subtly added to the sensory effect. Kuroda has worked with the band since 1989, and has used his increasingly complex lighting rigs to “jam” with the band.
At Sphere, his lighting setup was scaled back – relatively speaking – to six vertical beams and four horizontal strips running behind the band onstage. The lights assumed more of a supporting role than at normal Phish shows, but still accentuated the sensory experience – and were integral parts of it on songs like “A Wave of Hope” and “2001.”
Phish perform “Taste” at Sphere on April 20, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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Still, as Holmes explained, the Sphere run was designed to “use all of the opportunities of the building – the audio, the visuals – and do it while supporting Phish truly playing music the way Phish plays music.” Phish’s run was revelatory in terms of production, but those bells and whistles only enhanced the music itself – which, as is often the case on Phish runs, deepened in scope and ambition with each show.
Musically, the band was at its exploratory best during the second sets of the final two shows. Phish appropriately made “Fuego,” off the 2014 album of the same name, a centerpiece of its 4/20 show, quickly abandoning the song’s Zeppelin-y riff for soaring art-rock, contemplative ambience and, eventually, heavy funk across jam’s 29-minute runtime. Later in the set, on reliable classic “Chalk Dust Torture,” Phish demonstrated the mature efficiency it has developed over the years, compellingly cycling through more musical ideas than its 16-minute duration might suggest.
The final night was even better. Sequenced in the same second-set two slot as “Fuego” the previous night, “Down With Disease,” a beloved Phish jam vehicle that has cracked 20 minutes more than 40 times since its 1995 debut, received a record-long rendition, clocking in at 34 minutes. Colorful ridges shapeshifted behind Phish as Anastasio and McConnell’s instruments panned across Sphere’s speakers. (Sphere Immersive Sound allows for the targeted movement of audio; used throughout Phish’s shows, some panning instances were additive, others disorienting.) As the jam unfolded, the quartet increasingly locked in, masterfully riding through peaks and grooves; after arriving in a krautrock-esque pocket, the band perfectly timed its return to the melodic reprise that ends the song. Inspired playing on “2001,” “Light” and “Piper” followed.
Periodic issues with panning and mix – which were more common at the start of the run, as Phish’s team learned Sphere’s acoustic intricacies – notwithstanding, Sphere’s audio significantly elevated even the slightest of songs. The high-end audio helped Gordon’s propulsive bass lines shine throughout the run, especially on songs like “Sand” and “Tube”; each member of the band was distinguishable at nearly every point during the shows – far from a given at many of the arenas and amphitheaters Phish regularly frequents.
Phish perform “Pillow Jets” at Sphere on April 20, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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And for all the focus on visual surprises – and how Phish would navigate a show where, inherently, their jamming inclinations and setlist were more tethered to a plan than usual – the band still offered up plenty of unexpected selections. After forgoing the interstitial “I Am Hydrogen” (and replacing it with “Lifeboy”) that typically sits between “Mike’s Song” and “Weekapaug Groove” on Thursday, the band played it Saturday – the first time that’s happened without its usual bookends since 1987 and, freed from its normal structure, a worthy lead-in to that show’s late highlight, “Chalk Dust Torture.”
Meanwhile, Phish played four unreleased songs that debuted in 2023 – which will ostensibly appear on their upcoming album Evolve, due this July – along with “Evolve” and four other songs from Anastasio’s pandemic-era solo albums which, like “Evolve,” may be reworked for Phish’s new set. The band’s treatment of this material was striking: “Pillow Jets” was visually paired with a trip through a forest where multicolored bursts shot up trees like fireworks; chatter for the rest of the run was that it was the single best animation the band played in front of. “Mercy” served a critical tonal link on Friday between “Axilla (Part II)” and “Bathtub Gin,” and “Hey Stranger” and “Oblivion” both received sterling readings on Sunday that lived up to the opportunity cost of other classics that went unplayed. (Conspicuously, at Sphere, Phish steered clear entirely of all the tracks comprising Gamehendge, the fantasy song cycle it revisited in full this past New Year’s Eve.)
The new music wasn’t limited to Phish’s Sphere performances proper. In the venue’s lobby – adorned with suspended red donuts in keeping with the band’s iconography – gentle guitar music played, composed of loops and layers that Anastasio recorded specially for the occasion. In a sentiment shared by many Phish fans, one X user posted, “Can’t wait for Trey to release ‘Music For Lobbies.’”
Phish perform “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing” at Sphere on April 19, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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That thoughtful ethos – carefully considering every aspect of the run to deliver a quality experience for dedicated fans – extended to the overarching creative vision of the shows. In the wee hours of the morning of April 18, Sphere posted a video with Phish tagged and the message “It’s only a matter of time…” Ahead of the Sphere run, Holmes had hinted the shows would have loose themes, and as the concerts took place, a matter-based nightly theme – progressing from solid to liquid to gas to plasma – became evident.
The most cohesive and effective was liquid, on the run’s second night. The band played several liquid-related songs across its two sets as visuals took fans from the water’s surface (on “Mercy” and “Bathtub Gin”) to the deep sea (on “Theme From The Bottom,” where unnerving schools of humans – not fish – darted across the screen).
The sequence was not only effective for the visuals, but for the playing… which despite setlist constraints, still breathed. When Phish’s crew hoisted two large jellyfish mobiles during “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing,” it felt monumental: Phish had married visuals on the screen, physical adornments, and outstanding jamming, and harnessed Sphere’s potential in the process.
The band had to sacrifice a degree of spontaneity to hit its marks, which surely frustrated some fans – but the magical payoff was worth it. Besides, the other night’s themes were less pronounced; while Phish seemed a little boxed-in by its setlist choices – and opening night jitters – during the run’s first show, it rarely felt musically constrained as its Sphere run progressed.
Phish perform “Wading In The Velvet Sea” at Sphere on April 19, 2024 in Las Vegas.
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At times, the shows felt like Phish’s own miniature Eras Tour – an ambitious, career-spanning concert experience that recontextualized, and pushed forward, old material while capably integrating newer songs. Phish didn’t dwell on the past, but tastefully nodded to it with the visuals for two songs that date back to the mid-’90s.
For its Friday encore of the tear-jerker “Wading In The Velvet Sea” (this was liquid night, after all), Phish programmed a slew of photos from throughout its history, which by the song’s climax coalesced into a sprawling collage. On Saturday, longtime Phish artist Jim Pollock’s etched illustrations for the first 20 volumes of the LivePhish series (released from 2001 to 2003) were brought to life as concentric rotating bronze bands that stretched to Sphere’s apex – amid so much artistic innovation, a savvy way of nodding to the creative whose visual style is most strongly associated with the band.
And the run’s bookends tied it all together. As tentative fans settled into the seats at the new-to-most venue on Thursday, Phish launched into “Everything’s Right” as geometric beams sprouted from the floor and ceiling behind them. For the closing song of its Sunday encore, the beams – now slightly rounded and colorized – reappeared for “Slave To The Traffic Light.” Gordon’s loping bass line assumed a victory-lap quality: Phish had mastered Sphere in its own distinct way.
You couldn’t throw a juggling stick in Las Vegas last week without hitting a Phish phan who was totally phreaking out about the band’s mind-melting run of shows at the Sphere. Definitely count comedian and The Price Is Right host Drew Carey among those whose minds were pried open by the visual and musical spectacle the veteran Vermont jam band brought to the one-of-a-kind venue.
How do we know Carey really, really enjoyed his first Phish-sperience? Well, he described it in vivid, strangely sexual detail in a bonkers rant on fellow comedian Taylor Tomlinson’s late night show After Midnight on Tuesday night. During the talky portion of the show where contestants typically answer the host’s jokey questions, Tomlinson asked Carey “if you weren’t being filmed right now, what would you say?”
That was all the runway Carey needed to launch into a psychedelic monologue that had the typically unflappable host looking amusingly shocked.
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“Gimme a minute. So, I saw Phish at the Sphere this weekend. Never saw Phish, didn’t know a Phish tune, and they f–king blew my mind off so hard,” Carey said as he hustled to center stage and began walking around animatedly and gesticulating like a religious convert as Tomlinson said “oh” and fellow guest “Weird” Al Yankovic looked delightedly confused. “I had a bunch of girls with me, and I thought to myself is this what it’s like to…” Carey said, as censors stepped in to bleep what appeared to be a graphic sexual description.
Carey definitely didn’t stop there. “It was like being edged for four days straight. And then right before the face-melting climax at the end of the fourth day, an angel comes down from heaven, Gabriel, and he shoots f–king heroin in your arm, and he says, ‘Good luck now motherf–er!’ And he leaves, and you have an orgasm for 15 minutes while your eyeballs fall out of your head!”
Cut to a shot of Tomlinson looking, well, amusingly phreaked out while the next five minutes of her show were totally, and hilariously, derailed by the Carey crack-up as Thomas Lennon (Reno 911!) could not stop making jokes about the rant. “Next time they play the Sphere, you better not miss it,” Carey counseled. “That was so great and we can definitely use all of it, absolutely, absolutely we can.” Tomlinson joked.
“HR wants to talk to all of you,” Lennon said.
What she couldn’t have used was an earlier from Carey on Monday, in which he got even more graphic. “I swear I just talked to God I would give you all my money, stick my d–k in a blender and swear off p—y for the rest of my life in exchange for this,” Carey wrote along with video of the show he saw. “Bro I met God tonight for real. I feel like I just got saved by Jesus no lie.”
Watch Carey’s Phish tale below.
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#Phish at the #SphereI swear I just talked to GodI would give you all my money, stick my dick in a blender and swear off pussy for the rest of my life in exchange for this. Bro I met God tonight for real. I feel like I just got saved by Jesus no lie pic.twitter.com/Wci1OdUp3F— ʎǝɹɐƆ ʍǝɹᗡ (@DrewFromTV) April 22, 2024
Papercuts, the first greatest-hits compilation from Linkin Park, debuts at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Hard Rock Albums chart dated April 27.
The set bows with 44,000 equivalent album units earned in the United States in its first week (April 12-18), according to Luminate. The majority (23,000) is from streaming equivalent units, with 21,000 in album sales.
Linkin Park now boasts a record-rewriting eight No. 1s on Top Hard Rock Albums, which began in 2007. The band pulls into sole possession of the most rulers in the tally’s history, passing Five Finger Death Punch, Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam; perhaps not to be outdone for long, Pearl Jam’s latest LP, Dark Matter, was released April 19 and will challenge for the top spot on the May 4 ranking.
Most No. 1s, Hard Rock Albums:8, Linkin Park7, Five Finger Death Punch7, Foo Fighters7, Pearl Jam6, Disturbed6, Korn
Linkin Park last led Top Hard Rock Albums with Meteora, following its 20th-anniversary reissue last April.
Papercuts also starts at No. 2 on Top Rock & Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums. As previously reported, it debuts at No. 6 on the all-genre Billboard 200, where it’s the band’s 11th top 10 and first since One More Light debuted at No. 1 in 2017.
The 20-song Papercuts includes singles from the majority of the band’s studio albums, as well as the previously unreleased “Friendly Fire” and outtake “QWERTY,” from the group’s 2006 EP LP Underground 6, a fan club-only collection. The new release’s “Lost” was released in 2023 on the 20th anniversary reissue of Meteora.
“QWERTY” concurrently debuts at No. 5 on the Hot Hard Rock Songs chart with 1.1 million official U.S. streams and 1,000 sold April 12-18. “Friendly Fire,” released Feb. 23, rises 42-37 on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs (after it debuted at its No. 13 high on the March 9 ranking) with 6.5 million radio audience impressions, 806,000 streams and 1,000 sold. It spent two weeks atop Rock & Alternative Airplay and one week at No. 1 on Mainstream Rock Airplay.
Linkin Park’s music rose 15% to 42.9 million official on-demand U.S. streams April 12-18, boosted by interest in not only the newly released “QWERTY” but also the band’s multi-album string of hits cataloged on Papercuts. The most-streamed Linkin Park song of the week was “Numb,” which accrued 4.7 million streams, up 9%. It’s just a tick ahead of “In the End,” also at 4.7 million streams rounded off, a boost of 10%. “One Step Closer” was third with 3 million streams, a 15% jump.
In all, the 20 songs on Papercuts encompass 10 of Linkin Park’s 12 career No. 1s on Alternative Airplay. The tracklist omits only three-week ruler “Lying From You” (2004) and four-frame leader “The Catalyst” (2010). As for Mainstream Rock Airplay, Papercuts features all but two of the band’s 10 No. 1s, both from 2014’s The Hunting Party: “Guilty All the Same” (featuring Rakim) and “Until It’s Gone.”
One More Light remains Linkin Park’s last studio album. Frontman Chester Bennington died two months after its May 19, 2017, release.
This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2004 Week continues here with the story behind Bowling for Soup’s “1985,” a ruefully nostalgic top 40 hit that has taken on a different meaning for its creators now that it’s been longer since its release than it was since the mid-’80s at the time.
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Like many songs, “1985” started with nothing but a wordless hook. It first came to former SR-71 frontman Mitch Allan while he was driving, after which he temporarily added in some filler to start with: “She’s a, she’s a, she’s a roller coaster.”
His decision to later swap it out for “19, 19, 1985” was just as random. The reason it stuck? “Honestly, it sang fantastic,” he recalls to Billboard over 20 years later.
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Later, the world would agree. Bowling for Soup had a No. 23 hit with the nostalgic earworm on the Billboard Hot 100 and a No. 10 peak on the Pop Airplay chart, propelling the band’s record A Hangover You Don’t Deserve to a career high of No. 37 on the Billboard 200. In the two decades since, the track has amassed over 372.7 million on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate, and folks who weren’t even alive in the title year continue to gleefully sing along when it comes on the radio or plays at a party, as it still frequently does.
But before it was an era-defining legacy hit for BFS, Allan had buried his original version on SR-71’s final album Here We Go Again, which was only released in Japan (until 2010, when it was finally made available in the U.S.). He’d pieced together the rest of the track on a trip to Machu Picchu, asking fellow tourists in his hiking group to shout out their favorite ‘80s references — “Springsteen!” “Madonna!” — and weaving them into an admittedly cynical takedown of a Prozac-dependent suburban housewife named Debbie with some help from his drummer, John Allen.
If not for producer Butch Walker, “1985” would’ve never been widely heard in the U.S., much less become an enduring smash for generations. But Walker had worked with Allan and SR-71 in the past, and at the suggestion of his manager, Jonathan Daniel, he decided that the track deserved a second life – something the guys of Bowling for Soup, fresh off their first Grammy nomination for pop-punk radio hit “Girl All the Bad Guys Want” in 2003, could give it.
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“The song was good, but it wasn’t great yet,” Walker recalls. “It’s all about who’s presenting it. I think we realized that maybe the presentation of it originally was wrong.”
First things came first. Led by frontman Jaret Reddick and bandmates Chris Burney, Gary Wiseman, and Rob Felicetti, the tongue-wagging Bowling for Soup had made a name off not taking itself too seriously, specializing in the creation of meme songs before memes were even a thing. That meant that some of the more sardonic lines about condoms breaking and George Michael’s sexuality needed to go.
“That’s the difference between the humor in SR-71 and us,” says Reddick. “Their songs had that grit in their comedy – it’s more snarky. Our stuff is just blatantly funny.”
He and Walker sat in a room together dissecting “1985” line by line, subbing in lyrics about Duran Duran and Ozzy Osbourne to coincide more with the personal tastes of Reddick, who was a teenager during the titular time period. The frontman gave the tune a peppier delivery, and Walker made it so that the song’s sunny “woo-hoo-hoo” hook was the very first thing listeners heard when pressing “play.”
“It was a collaborative effort,” Reddick says. “Had I heard the song by SR-71, I’m certain I would’ve liked it, ’cause I’m a fan of that band. But I don’t think it gives me the same visual at all.”
Allan, now an L.A.-based writer-producer who’s worked with Bebe Rexha and Demi Lovato, agrees. “[Reddick] took this sad woman who we were making fun of and turned her into the hero of the story,” he marvels. “She’s suddenly celebrating that she got to live in 1985 and that we, the listener, didn’t. Life was so much better then, and she got to experience it.
“[The original] version in my brain has been replaced by Bowling for Soup’s,” he concludes.
Released as the lead single off Hangover, “1985” made BFS a staple of the early 2000s pop-punk movement. The band cosplayed as Robert Palmer, Run-DMC and Limp Bizkit in the track’s music video (which Reddick says he’s especially proud of), complete with a Tawny Kitaen lookalike and a cameo from Allan.
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They embarked on a tour, and then another one and another one, discovering that their fans across the world never tired of mocking Debbie night after night – because, let’s face it: “The song’s kind of mean,” Reddick admits. “We made it nicer, for sure. But there’s still a bit of hopelessness to it.”
The guys didn’t get sick of playing it, either. “The fact that it’s something our band does that makes people happy – that’s the thing that never gets old,” Reddick continues. “Right from the first two chords, they know what it is. Every phone comes up during that song. People still laugh at ‘When did Mötley Crüe become classic rock?’”
But something peculiar happened right around the time Bowling for Soup’s version of the song came out – Reddick became a parent. So did Allan. Their first-born kids are now 21 and 20, respectively, almost the exact number of years between 1985 and 2004 as 2004 and 2024. As time went by, a song about nostalgia became nostalgic in and of itself, and its creators realized that they were beginning to identify more with Debbie than her proverbial two kids in high school. In 2021, Bowling for Soup put out a track titled “Getting Old Sucks (But Everybody’s Doing It).”
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“I started to see it really quickly,” remembers Reddick, now a father of three. “It wasn’t lost on me that that was actually happening in my life. When they’re really little, they still think all your jokes are funny. Then they go through this time where they don’t think you’re funny, then they think you’re funny again but roll their eyes. My kids’ teachers tell them, ‘I heard your dad on the radio today,’ and they’re just like, ‘Okay, great. He also mowed the lawn today, and there’s a heap of dishes to get done.’”
Allan relates: “I’m Dad – I’m not cool.”
Luckily for them both, as well as all the former cool kids-turned-Debbies, things have a way of coming back into fashion. Debbie herself — who, as Reddick points out, is probably a grandma now — would be overjoyed that her precious Springsteen and Madonna are both on arena tours in 2024, while U2 is on the heels of a successful Las Vegas residency. And modern pop stars have been in the midst of a pop-punk renaissance for most of the decade now, replicating the sounds popularized by Bowling for Soup and their peers.
“Everybody’s trying to make records sound like [“1985”] now,” Walker says with a chuckle. “It’s ironic that that’s where we’re at. I guess I’ve been alive that f–king long … I can’t believe we’re already back at recycling the emo era and the pop punk era, sound-wise.”
“All my kids went through a pop-punk phase,” adds Allan. “It takes them a minute. They discover bands, and then they discover my band. I get texts from my oldest who’s at UCSB, and she’ll be at a party and there’s a band playing, and they’ll be playing ‘1985.’ She’s like, ‘Oh my god, my dad wrote that!’”
Meanwhile, “1985” has demonstrated an impressive longevity. It was certified double platinum in 2019, and Reddick and Allan still enjoy sending each other young musicians’ updated covers of the song with references to the early ’00s and 2010s – which, ironically, sometimes go over the now-52-year-old Reddick’s head.
“I’m Debbie!” he proclaims, mystified. “People come up to us like, ‘I am Debbie.’ She’s probably now looking back at her kids, and they’re the Debbies of the world. And she’s like, ‘You see?’”
But just as Debbie gets the last laugh in her story, so does he: Reddick remembers a time when his daughter called him from science class in disbelief, asking if he knew just how many Spotify listeners his band had. “I was like, ‘I don’t know, 2 million monthly?’ She goes, ‘Dad, that’s a lot!’ I go ‘Yeah, I’ve been trying to tell you that.’” (For the record, BFS has nearly 4 million monthly listeners on the platform at press time.)
Reddick, Allan and Walker are all living in real time the reason they believe “1985” has had such a lasting resonance across generations. Aging and nostalgia are some of the only truly universal human experiences, which means that the song, unlike some of the dated ‘80s tropes it pokes fun at, will probably never go out of style.
But “1985” also speaks to the power of leaving egos at the door in service of collaboration. The project wouldn’t have been a success story without Allan being open to having his creation improved upon, or Bowling for Soup’s willingness to stand behind a song that they hadn’t written originally.
“I’m super glad this song has had such a good run,” Reddick says. “I’m not sure that we wouldn’t be where we are today [without it], but I certainly am thankful we are.”
“You hope a song goes on the charts, let alone enters the top 10, let alone is around a year later,” Allan remarks. “It takes a village. But I’m so happy to live in that village, you know?”
Radiohead has officially entered YouTube‘s Billion Views Club, as the video for their 1992 classic, “Creep,” surpassed a billion views on the platform. The milestone marks the UK rockers’ first video to accomplish the feat. The clip is simple but effective, featuring the band — comprised of Thom Yorke; brothers Jonny Greenwood and Colin Greenwood; Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway […]
This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2004 Week continues here as we hear from an artist behind arguably the year’s biggest rock album: Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, whose punk-rock opera American Idiot sold millions and spawned four huge hit singles, led by its pointedly enduring titular protest anthem.
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One of music’s biggest stories in 2004 was Green Day’s resurrection. After a ’90s run that included era-defining alt-rock and MTV hits like “Longview,” “Basket Case,” “When I Come Around” and “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” the band had taken a folkier turn on its 2000 album Warning – and experienced its softest sales and least enthusiastic reviews in years. With a new generation of pop-punk and emo bands emerging, Green Day could’ve easily seemed like a relic by 2004.
But with that year’s album American Idiot, Green Day reasserted itself as a mainstream force – eclipsing even its monumental ’90s – with a dramatic reinvention. On the album, the band infused its tested brand of pop-punk with classic-rock grandiosity, grafting an anti-war storyline of disillusionment onto the 57-minute set; in interviews ahead of its release, Green Day’s members likened American Idiot to a “punk-rock opera,” drawing a direct line from idols like The Who to their own new project.
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“The melodies are based on the tradition of Lennon and McCartney,” frontman Billie Joe Armstrong tells Billboard today. “That’s where we were trying to push our stuff and take our melodies and the whole idea of Green Day – pushing it to a level that we thought could be our Tommy moment, or our Sgt. Pepper’s.”
The high-concept, high-octane album blew up like the heart-shaped hand grenade on its iconic cover. Recorded during the early days of the Iraq War and released three months before President George W. Bush’s eventual re-election, the title track and lead single took aim at news illiteracy, widespread propaganda and “a redneck agenda”; in its stark, Grammy-nominated video, the stripes wash off a giant American flag suspended behind the band. “American Idiot” topped the Alternative Airplay chart, snagged a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year and ignited a run of subsequent Idiot Hot 100 smashes — which included the caustic protest anthem “Holiday” (No. 19), as well as the power ballads “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends” (Nos. 2 and 6, respectively).
All told, American Idiot snagged six Grammy nominations (winning Best Rock Album), was certified six-times platinum by the RIAA, and launched a 17-month world tour that spawned the live album Bullet in a Bible. In a couple short years, Green Day went from possibly-over-the-hump ’90s greats to being in the mix for the world’s biggest rock band.
Recently, Armstrong says, a fan approached him at London’s BRIT Awards. “They go, ‘American Idiot changed my life.’ And I said, ‘It changed my life too!’” he recalls with a laugh. “It changed everything for me. … It really made me feel like I can spread my wings. It proved to me that, if you have the guts to do it, then you can make it happen. When you have a hunch that it’s time to make a big statement, musically, and it gets acknowledged, it’s the best feeling ever.”
In the years since its release, American Idiot’s stature has only grown. Green Day has frequently harnessed the album’s urgent political energy since, including for this year’s Saviors, and American Idiot became the basis of the Tony-winning 2009 musical of the same name. Its songs remain staples of the band’s concerts, and Green Day has made headlines in recent years by revising the title track’s lyrics to address former President Donald Trump. This year, the band will perform American Idiot — as well as another of its seminal albums celebrating a milestone anniversary, 1994’s Dookie — in full on The Saviors Tour of North American stadiums.
On the eve of that tour, which kicks off overseas in late May, Armstrong admits, “I haven’t really acknowledged how proud I am of that record in a long time.” Below he talks more about American Idiot, being inspired by the New York bands of the early ’00s (and not so much by the period’s pop-punk), and why he still considers rock music to be “the underdog.”
Take me back to 2003, and Green Day’s headspace when you went into the studio to record American Idiot. After the ’90s and Warning, did you see American Idiot as the start of Green Day 2.0?
When we did Warning, we were definitely trying to do something different from [our] sound than we’d ever done before. It was a little bit more folky, a lot more acoustic guitar. That was foreshadowing for what would end up becoming American Idiot. We had a studio that we were going into every day in Oakland called [Studio] 880, and we just started to experiment in there. We were like the inmates running the asylum for months. Then we came upon doing a concept record that was right in the middle of the George Bush administration and the war in Iraq.
To what extent when you went in were you planning on this being a more political record? Or did that emerge organically during your sessions and your experimentation?
When I wrote the song “American Idiot” is when. It was just such a bold statement – bolder than I had ever said before politically. When we started [recording], we just talked about the song and we were all on the same page. It felt dangerous and risky and fun at the same time, if that’s even possible. We all agreed that this was the right way to go. And then with that came songs like “Holiday.”
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It’s hard to imagine a single that’s more in your face than “American Idiot,” in both sound and subject matter. Was there any resistance from your team or your label about that being the lead single?
No, I didn’t feel like there was any resistance. We felt empowered when we did the demo and when we recorded it. I don’t think we really worried about anything – it gave us a bit more swagger, to be honest, because we knew that we were sitting on a song that we really believed in. The label, they were great. There was no blowback from them at all.
“American Idiot” has taken on this second life – you’ve called out President Trump a number of times when performing that song in recent years. Did you ever think when you were making it that it would end up being a living document, and that the ills it documented would persist long after the Bush era?
I don’t really know what I thought, like what kind of legs that that song was gonna have. I remember when Trump got into office, that song was getting played a lot. The first trip that he took to England, [a British social media campaign was] trying to get “American Idiot” to go No. 1. I think it got to number two. [Laughs.] When the song first came out, I think we were like, “This could blow up in our faces, but who cares? We’ve said something that we really felt strongly about.” Then, as the record kept getting bigger and bigger, I just said, “Man, we really made something that is special that’s gonna stand the test of time.”
A political record and tackling some of these themes would have been challenging enough, but then you had the rock opera concept and story on top of it. Why was that narrative structure the right way to present this subject matter?
It made the record personal. It was coming from the heart. And then, it was also not just finger pointing, but questioning my own ignorance, at the same time, and posing the questions to myself. The one thing about a lot of punk-rock bands that are political, it seems that they come across as politicians. For me, it was just — the one thing we all have in common is that we’re living the human experience. So I wanted the songs to come from the heart as much as they came from the head.
Green Day has always had a young fan base, and American Idiot was a huge touchstone for so many kids who were going through adolescence and waking up to the news and current events. This might have been the first political record they ever got. How did you feel about Green Day’s role in the political awakening of Millennials?
9/11 defined a generation in the same way that the Vietnam War defined a generation. It was just that sort of era of fear that every generation has to endure. When the Twin Towers fell down, it created a generation of paranoia. Looking back, three years after 9/11, a lot of people when they heard the music [on American Idiot], [there was] this push back [happening] and [we] created like a soundtrack for that push back.
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“American Idiot” and “Holiday” were very political – and very successful – singles. But American Idiot spawned two even bigger, less politically oriented singles: “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” How do these pop crossover moments fit into the album as a whole?
“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” became a part of the narrative of the record, because [it’s what the] Jesus of Suburbia character was going through. That song, it comes across as someone growing up that feels very self-righteous, until they come across into the real world and find [themselves] in a very lonely place. I wrote that song when I was spending time in New York. I was by myself, and not knowing really anything about New York, I just sort of dropped myself right into the Lower East Side. I honestly didn’t know where I was at. I have a horrible sense of direction. That that song is exactly that: It’s about my horrible sense of direction.
Green Day was a defining alt-rock band of the ’90s. Then, as you’re in the studio recording American Idiot, there’s a new wave of alt-rock popping up, whether it’s what’s happening on New York’s Lower East Side with The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or the next generation of pop-punk bands who were dominating Warped Tour. Was what was going on in alt-rock percolating through to you when you were in the studio or were you sealed off?
For us, power-pop or whatever, we just wanted to bring it to a new level. A lot of that music at that time, as far as the pop-punk stuff was, it just became, like, commercial on purpose. [Laughs.] The pop-punk stuff, it just seemed trivial. It seemed really generic, and I didn’t really like it at all. The subject matter was just really shallow. It felt paint by numbers. The New York stuff that was going on, where it was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Strokes and Interpol, felt very real to me — because it felt like a scene, and it felt like people were very serious about making music. I found that to be really inspiring.
You’re playing American Idiot and Dookie all the way through this summer to celebrate their respective 20th and 30th anniversaries. As you’ve revisited American Idiot ahead of that tour, what has stood out to you?
American Idiot was sort of this unicorn that [during its album cycle] we were like, “OK, let’s get past this and move on.” We played it in its entirety at the Fillmore [in San Francisco] the other night. Revisiting it was cathartic, for lack of a better cliché. Playing songs like “Extraordinary Girl” and “Whatsername,” there were times on stage where I was getting choked up because it was bringing me back the feeling that I had at that time, that I was revisiting for the first time in 20 years. I had a great sense of pride and I was sort of humbled by the experience.
More and more artists are doing tours where they play classic albums in full. Why is that an effective way to connect with fans?
Playing it the other night at the Fillmore, just looking at people’s faces, there were people that were crying. I saw this one person that was in the crowd that was transgender, and I could see the tears coming out. I realized how far we’ve come. Green Day has been a space for people to feel a connection with people that are kindred spirits. It was really heavy to see people just sort of – we’re playing “Homecoming” and “Whatsername” and “Are We The Waiting” and people [are] just crying. I was kind of taken aback by it. I think it’s great that bands are revisiting their albums, because these are works of art. [Weezer’s] Blue Album is a work of art, just as much as Tommy is a work of art. This sounds really pretentious, but it’s like when an orchestra is playing Mozart. I think rock music is just as important.
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One of the most adventurous parts of American Idiot is “Jesus of Suburbia,” the five-part, nine-minute epic. It’s still a fan favorite. Did you have any doubts when putting that song together – and has its longevity surprised you?
“Jesus of Suburbia,” that’s one of my proudest moments for Green Day. I remember the first time that we ever played it [in July 2004]. We were rehearsing at the Olympic Auditorium down in Los Angeles. We were really tight. We were playing every day and we thought, “Hey, let’s do a cheap ticket, people can come see us play.” That was the first time that we played it in front of people. They kind of couldn’t believe what we had done. It was this nine-minute epic, where people were used to our two-and-a-half, three-minute songs. The reaction was so positive in a way where people just couldn’t believe what they were hearing. I’m really proud of that song and how it was inspired by The Who and we just got to have that moment.
We don’t see rock smashes quite like American Idiot these days. What are your thoughts about the arc of rock as a mainstream genre – and how it fits into the pop landscape – since American Idiot came out?
There’s a lot of great rock music that’s out right now. And I think, in a way, it’s more popular than ever. You see these festivals that are popping up all over America. Something like Aftershock [in Sacramento] – they’re huge! Like, 50,000 people are coming out. To me, that feels like rock is bigger than it’s ever been, especially in the last 10 years. It just doesn’t get covered.
But in a way, rock music has always been underground and the underdog, as far as what goes on in the pop world. It’s always been that way. It’s been that way, really, since 1948.