BeatRoute Magazine ON Edition - February 2020

MUSiC ARTIST INTERVIEW
SAY HELLO TO A
NEW, OLDER, AND
LESS MATURE
GREEN DAY
THE POP PUNK FOREBEARS
COME OF AGE, AGAIN.
PAMELA LITTKY
It’s mid-January, and Tre Cool is looking forward to
the National Hockey League’s All-Star Weekend in St.
Louis, Missouri. The Green Day drummer is hoping to
drive a zamboni at some point during the weekend.
“It’s like a fancy lawnmower that squirts water, and I’m
driving the motherfucker,” he says. I ask if he needs
a special license to drive one. “Just a license to fuck shit
up,” he fires back.
Cool and his long-time Green Day bandmates—hyper,
pointy-haired frontman Billie Joe Armstrong and stoic,
always-sleeveless bassist Mike Dirnt—are prepping for
a whirlwind year. They’re co-headlining with Weezer and
Fall Out Boy on this summer’s high-profile Hella Mega
Tour, but first they’ll release their 13th studio album,
Father Of All Motherfuckers. Gone are Green Day’s earlyoughts
days of nine-minute medley epics, hour-plus album
runtimes, and sobering sociopolitical narratives.
With 10 tracks that run just over 26 minutes, Father is
a frantic coke binge, a glammed-up garage-rock record
that’s committed more to revelry than revolution. I wonder
if, at this stage in their career, it’s hard to tap into that
shithead-teenager mindset. “We’re still in our high school
band,” laughs Cool. “What you’re hearing is a new, older,
less mature Green Day.”
Father marks the first record for which the band worked
with producer Butch Walker, who scaled back their
tendencies for the grandiose and nudged them towards
something that felt more intuitive. “It was very freeing,”
says Cool. “[Walker] is no-nonsense. You lock in a sound
and go. You don’t chase your tail looking for that perfect
sound.”
The approach is somewhat surprising. Walker’s work
with acts like Fall Out Boy, P!nk, and Avril Lavigne has
carved space for their records in the sweet spot between
pop and punk. He helmed Taylor Swift’s prescient
country-to-pop shift with 2012’s Red and catapulted
English rock band The Struts to international fame with
their dancey rock jam “Body Talks.” Father borrows
sonically from that 2018 Struts single, especially on the
titular opening track with Armstrong’s overdriven falsetto
vocals and dirty-sleek guitars.
Green Day have zig-zagged from basement punks
to acoustic balladeers to pop punk trend-setters, but
pressed for a high-water mark, there are two obvious
answers: 1994’s slacker-hymnal Dookie and 2004’s
anti-American treatise American Idiot. The latter remains
their most influential and memorable, not least of all for
its accompanying red-white-and-black aesthetic. It was
6 BEATROUTE FEBRUARY 2020