In a new interview with Kerrang, Billie Joe Armstrong talked about Green Day’s try at a Bon Jovi-style ballad on ‘Nimrod.’
The album included the acoustic ballad ‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),’ which the singer wrote years earlier about an ex-girlfriend and finally found a place on this album. “The string section thing was just something that had to be done,” Armstrong said. “At first it was a whole orchestra in there, and they’d all come in like, ‘SHUNG!’”
He continued, “And we were standing there going to the orchestra, ‘Erm, jeez, okay, you two – out, and you two, and you over there – out you go.’ We eventually cut it down to four people. It was amazing to watch, but quite cringy at the same time. In the studio, we played it as a big, Bon Jovi-style ballad. Now that was funny!”
‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)’ became a huge hit, used in TV shows and sports moments. ‘Nimrod’ sold millions and their concerts grew bigger. Green Day found new success with the album.
“We didn’t want to do another ‘Dookie,’ we wanted to stretch out,” Billie Joe further noted. “We’re punks, obviously, but we’re also songwriters, and we’ll be writing songs for the rest of our lives.”
“When I look back now, on both ‘Nimrod’ and ‘Warning,’ we were pushing ourselves in a different direction,” the vocalist also told NME in 2022. “Without those records, there wouldn’t have been an ‘American Idiot’ or a ’21st Century Breakdown.’ It’s about trying to push things in a new direction all the time.”
“I shotgunned two beers and then I went out and did it, and it worked. And people were really into it and singing along,” Armstrong discussed the first time he played the song live during Krissy Teegerstrom’s Beyond + Back podcast. “It was like a breakthrough. As soon as you hit that breakthrough, instantly in your mind you start going ‘I can do this. What if I try playing it a little more country music? Or what if I tried using loops and stuff like that?’ Automatically it gives you confidence.”
‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)’ was featured in many popular moments, like a scene on ‘ER’ when a cancer patient dies, the finale of ‘Seinfeld’ in 1998, and a blooper reel in the 2024 movie ‘Deadpool & Wolverine.’