Day 19 (April 7): Green Day - Jesus of Suburbia

GREEN DAY - American Idiot [Vinyl] - Amazon.com MusicI'll level with you, reader (wait, do I have readers? NB for future: check to see if I have readers). I am grumpy today. It happens. It happens more often than usual at the moment for reasons that I do not feel the need to explain. Given the choice, I probably would have weaselled my way out of blogging today.

Except I have shackled myself to this daily commitment, come rain or shine, so that is a no go. There will be grumpy days to come, too, and so it becomes my job to figure out how to write during those days anyway. And when I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, Billie Joe Armstrong comes to me, speaking words of wisdom: let it be something about American breakdowns.

It was during a particularly not great mental health time last year that I aggressively, not-ironically-enough, remembered the joys of 21st Century Breakdown, and since then, the albums that Green Day made before their recent public midlife crisis have been a weird balm to me. I don't know why. Maybe I imagine I could be Billie Joe. I can't tell you the specifics.

Today's song of the day is 'Jesus of Suburbia' from American Idiot. That's an album full of lengthy tunes, but most of them cheat, reaching the eight or nine minute mark by virtue of actually being two songs in one. Not so 'Jesus of Suburbia', which clocks in at nine minutes and sounds like it would happily go further.

The thing that I love about really long songs is that they're forced to take a bunch of different (musical) shapes in order to stay fresh. Ordinarily, Green Day like to hit one note and just hammer at it for the length of the song, so the aggressively changeable nature of 'Jesus of Suburbia', which tries is hand at a little bit of each style of every other song on the album, is honestly kind of a joy.

It feels like an absurdly loaded pastry: it's one thing, but it has everything, and it will fill you up for days, leaving you bloated but satisfied that you had the experience.

See, I'm less grumpy now. Green Day, you've done it again.

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