![]() He recently finished a song he’s been tinkering with since 1993. Some hits have come to him in five minutes, others take longer. I think that that’s the thing that actually ends up transcending.” “When people find a deep connection, it’s because you’re trying to find your own connection inside of yourself. Whether he’s writing punk songs or a politically powered rock opera, Armstrong has the same rules: “It’s so important to try and be as honest as you possibly can with your audience,” he says. His three-chord anthems about growing up - with all the loneliness, anxiety, drug use, and masturbation that can come along the way - resonated with a generation on 1994’s diamond-certified Dookie and beyond. “All he said was, ‘It’s verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus - mix it up any way you want.’ ” Pretty soon, that was all Armstrong could think about. “I said, ‘How do you write a song?’ ” says the Green Day singer-guitarist, 47, at his studio in Oakland. Roots matter to me, I guess.Billie Joe Armstrong remembers asking his guitar teacher a question that would change his life. People ask me, like, “Why do you maintain these relationships for so long?” I don’t know. I’m very deeply connected to Adrienne, and I’m very deeply connected to Green Day. ![]() I think about this song as an extension of “2000 Light Years Away,” 20-something years apart. We tend to overthink the things that are not really important. It’s just finding out that the things in life that are more simple are actually the biggest connections that you can have. Then I ended up writing this song, “Ordinary World,” that sounded more country, and it just sort of fit the movie. One of them was “Outlaws,” which is also on Revolution Radio. I was in a movie called Ordinary World in 2016, and the director, Lee Kirk, wanted a song that kind of summed up the character’s life. His punk-rock dreams however, have yet to die. Instead of a career in the music industry, Miller works an ordinary job and lives with his ordinary family. The lead character can be viewed as Billie Joe himself in an alternate world in which Green Day was never successful. The lyrics are told from the perspective of the character Armstrong plays in the film, Perry Miller. The title of the song is also a callback to the song “Extraordinary Girl” from American Idiot, which opens with the lyrics “She’s an extraordinary girl/in an ordinary world” Armstrong was happy enough with the outcome of this track that he opted to include it on the album. “Ordinary World” wasn’t originally written for the album, but for the soundtrack of the movie of the same name. An acoustic ballad, written in the rhetorical style of folk classics such as Bob Dylan’s “Blowin' In The Wind” and Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” – which Green Day had already referenced in American Idiot's “Letterbomb” – “Ordinary World,” presents verses composed of hypotetical questions left unanswered, and provides an optimistic atmosphere to close the album.
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