Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A man once asked me, what's punk? I kicked over a trash can and said that's punk. He kicked over a trash can and then asked me again, Is that punk? I replied no. That's just trendy.
I know I'm always going to be a musician, for the rest of my life. That's for sure. It's about how you balance between being a musician and being a parent, and making it intertwined.
Some times I need to apologize, sometimes I need to admit that I ain't right, sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut, or only say hello, sometimes I still feel I'm walking alone.
A guy walks up to me and asks, "What's Punk?". So I kick over a garbage can and say. "That's punk!". So he kicks over the garbage can and says, "That's Punk?", and I say, "No that's trendy!
Just seeing the things on TV and the things in front of you, the amount of information coming in, and the lack of information not coming in, how could you not help but write songs about it.
The thing is, my education was music. I knew I'd be playing music no matter what. That's all I thought about, I was obsessed with it. I'm still obsessed with it. It gets the best of me sometimes.
When I signed that major-label contract when I was 20 years old. I did it because I wanted to play music for the rest of my life. That's every 20-year-old's dream - to do whatever the hell you want.
That's where all good music comes from, I think - anything that's likely to have an impact on pop culture comes from a point where there's no expectation of it becoming anything other than personal.
There are always young bands playing in their garages. A lot of punk rock is not going to be in the mainstream. It's below the radar. The beauty of it is that you're not supposed to always know. It's subterranean.
Madisyn [Shipman] was great. She's a really talented kid. We got along great. It was fun, in between scenes, I'd pull out my iPod and show her different old rock 'n' roll and punk stuff, and she was really into it.
We do have American Idiot picked up by HBO and I wrote the record and concept to it. [We have] the writer Rolin Jones and [director] Michael Mayer [who also directed the Broadway production], so we'll see what happens.
We've been together as a group for a long time so this means a lot... we've done everything ourselves until this point, so thank you to everybody ... do everything you f - -n' believe in, because this is what it's all about.
Just because you sing songs about a certain feeling doesn't mean you have to go feeling that way forever. You can sing about that for the rest of your life, but that doesn't mean things aren't going to change in your own life.
Set lists are tough because you come up with this structure of how the songs are going to go from one to the next, but at the same time, you have to be spontaneous and take requests and change the set list at the drop of a hat.
I think everybody should get married. Boys and girls. Girls and boys. Boys and boys! Girls and girls! Shouldn't we all be entitled to a family-Civil rights baby it's civil rights. It doesn't get any better here in Berkeley I'll tell you that.
I threw a big-ass party. It turned out a bit different from Perry's [in That's Ordinary World], but it was pretty nuts. It wasn't me that threw it though, my wife threw me a surprise party. So [unlike Selma Blair's character] she didn't forget.
Controversy What controversy This is reality. What I see is that no matter if you're a conservative or a liberal or whatever side you stand on, this is the reality of the situation - that people's families and their young kids are being affected.
I think people are born bisexual, and it's just that our parents and society kind of veer us off into this feeling of 'Oh, I can't'. They say it's taboo. It's ingrained in our heads that it's bad, when it's not bad at all. It's a very beautiful thing.
It's not only exciting to watch, but you can also speak a different language with each other. It's a music language that's unique, compared to what other parents do, especially in their professional lives. Not everybody can talk about being an accountant.
And for our fans, they're just crazy people anyway. I always look at people in a Green Day shirt, and I think, 'What's wrong with that person? What kind of hang-ups does that person have?' Obviously, it's not just the catchy songs, it goes deeper than that.
I was on drugs when I wrote some of my songs. It was a rough time for me, but I'm lucky enough to be one of the people who learned from that experience and moved on, where other people just got addicted and more addicted and more addicted until it killed them.
We stayed very close to each other [with Leek Kirk], and Lee was amazing. We'd go through the script together, rehearsing it before every shot with the other actors. He was just easy to work with. We were able to put it in my language, which was really important.
I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.
As agent asked if I wanted to be represented, and I said, "Yeah, sure, I'll give it a shot!" It was never something I had really put that much thought into. But then, Lee Kirk reached out and asked if I was interested, and I read the script of the [Ordinary World] and said, "Absolutely!"
We never fit in completely to [the punk] scene because we were writing love songs that were heartfelt and endearing. Some of the punks didn't know what to make of us, but I finally realized that was what made us punk. We sang what we meant, from the heart, and didn't worry about what anyone was going to think.
I think that's the big difference between this one [Ordinary World] and a lot of the other rock 'n' roll movies. They're playing to tape, but Fred Armisen and I were actually in a rock 'n' roll bad together. I also really related to the character, especially when it came to the parenting part. I'm a pretty klutzy parent.
I definitely related a lot to Perry [from That's Ordinary World movie]. I liked how he put family first. I identified with the exhaustion and klutziness that comes with being a parent, and how he's just a rock-and-roller at heart. For me, it was fun to kind of imagine whether or not this could've been the path I went on, or not.
The record [American Idiot ] felt special to us, when we recorded it, with all of the artwork and the concept behind it and it being a rock opera, but we didn't really know where it was going to go. It's like I always say, you just follow the music. Not only was American Idiot a special moment for us, but it also led to Ordinary World, too.
Songs are like a form of chaos that you can control. It's a form of intelligence that maybe you only understand and you hope that someone else can understand. And you can be anyone you want: you can be as grandiose as you want or you can be as down in the gutter as you want. It's just sort of whatever emotional freeway you're on at the time.
When you start getting into your politics it's like you have to be vulnerable and you have to be sort of sensitive. Because if it's always like straight aggression all the time, there becomes no empathy for the stance that you're taking. You're not telling people to think, you're telling them what to think. And also you have to be honest with yourself on that, too.
The main thing about the character [in the Ordinary World] is that he loves music, and he shares it with his daughter. He's having a mid-life moment, and it's a small moment, really. I think that the character actually really loves where he's at, in his life. He's just trying to have it make a little bit more sense while he figures out what he actually wants to do with it.
There were a couple of times, leading up to shooting [Ordinary World], where I was like, "Oh, my god, what did I get myself into? Hopefully, I don't ruin this guy's precious script." And then, after a couple of days of shooting, I started getting in the groove of it and it was really fun. I love being a rookie at stuff. It makes it feel vital. I love doing things I've never done before, and I love making stuff.
There are many things in life that you feel you need such as television, magazines, teachers telling that you have to make money and be successful, but if you have some kind of hope, something to hold onto, then all this will no longer be important. If you can make your next day better than the previous one, then you will see what it really means something to you and not everything that people think you need for your life.