Green Day released their latest album Revolution Radio earlier this month, so I thought I'd look back at their catalog.

Green Day Deep Album Cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Going To Pasalacqua
2. One For The Razorbacks
3. Christie Road
4. Burnout
5. Coming Clean
6. F.O.D.
7. Emenius Sleepus
8. In The End
9. Chump
10. Panic Song
11. Armatage Shanks
12. Bab's Uvula Who?
13. Uptight
14. Jinx
15. Haushinka
16. King For A Day
17. Blood, Sex And Booze
18. Church On Sunday
19. Castaway
20. Give Me Novacaine/She's A Rebel
21. Whatsername
22. Murder City
23. Stay The Night
24. Stop When The Red Lights Flash
25. 8th Avenue Serenade
26. Say Goodbye

Track 1 from 39/Smooth (1990)
Tracks 2 and 3 from Kerplunk (1992)
Tracks 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 from Dookie (1994)
Tracks 10, 11 and 12 from Insomniac (1995)
Tracks 13, 14, 15 and 16 from Nimrod (1997)
Tracks 17, 18 and 19 from Warning (2000)
Tracks 20 and 21 from American Idiot (2004)
Track 22 from 21st Century Breakdown (2009)
Track 23 from ¡Uno! (2012)
Track 24 from ¡Dos! (2012)
Track 25 from ¡Tre! (2012)
Track 26 from Revolution Radio (2016)

By the time Green Day broke through in 1994, I was a snobby little 12-year-old who had eagerly greeted most of the big alt-rock breakthrough bands up to that point, and had started moving on to slightly less popular stuff like Sonic Youth. So I was not impressed by Green Day at all initially, and kind of turned my nose up as people I knew got into them. This began a couple of decades of encountering their music casually -- my brother's cassette of Dookie, a promo of Warning that my friend who worked at a radio station gave me, etc. -- until I eventually warmed to the band.

But I absolutely hated what the band became with the huge comeback record American Idiot, and that kind of helped me realize what I liked about the band's '90s stuff. Listening back to their early work, though, it shouldn't have surprised me so much that Billie Joe Armstrong started writing politically charged rock operas or recording albums of Everly Brothers covers. There were some intersong segues and bits of acoustic guitar even on Dookie, and it only took two more albums to introduce violin and horn sections on Nimrod, an album that I think has aged pretty well. But I was kind of amazed to hear how fully formed their signature sound was from the very beginning on 39/Smooth, their first drummer is not as insanely talented as Tre Cool but he plays pretty much the same beats that Billie Joe's songs demand.

The ill-fated trio of 2012 albums contain a lot of my favorite later Green Day music, but obviously you'd have to wade through a lot of stuff to come up with a tight record there. But my favorite record they've made since Warning is actually the 2008 garage rock album by Foxboro Hot Tubs, one of a couple of Green Day side projects that are essentially all three members of the band operating under aliases. Sometimes I wonder if they're better off when they've shaken off the pressure of living up to being Green Day.

Previous playlists in the Deep Album Cuts series:
Vol. 1: Brandy
Vol. 2: Whitney Houston
Vol. 3: Madonna
Vol. 4: My Chemical Romance
Vol. 5: Brad Paisley
Vol. 6: George Jones
Vol. 7: The Doors
Vol. 8: Jay-Z
Vol. 9: Robin Thicke
Vol. 10: R. Kelly
Vol. 11: Fall Out Boy
Vol. 12: TLC
Vol. 13: Pink
Vol. 14: Queen
Vol. 15: Steely Dan
Vol. 16: Trick Daddy
Vol. 17: Paramore
Vol. 18: Elton John
Vol. 19: Missy Elliott
Vol. 20: Mariah Carey
Vol. 21: The Pretenders
Vol. 22: "Weird Al" Yankovic
Vol. 23: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
Vol. 24: Foo Fighters
Vol. 25: Counting Crows
Vol. 26: T.I.
Vol. 27: Jackson Browne
Vol. 28: Usher
Vol. 29: Mary J. Blige
Vol. 30: The Black Crowes
Vol. 31: Ne-Yo
Vol. 32: Blink-182
Vol. 33: One Direction
Vol. 34: Kelly Clarkson
Vol. 35: The B-52's
Vol. 36: Ludacris
Vol. 37: They Might Be Giants
Vol. 38: T-Pain
Vol. 39: Snoop Dogg
Vol. 40: Ciara
Vol. 41: Creedence Clearwater Revival
Vol. 42: Dwight Yoakam
Vol. 43: Demi Lovato
Vol. 44: Prince
Vol. 45: Duran Duran
Vol. 46: Rihanna
Vol. 47: Janet Jackson
Vol. 48: Sara Bareilles
Vol. 49: Motley Crue
Vol. 50: The Who
Vol. 51: Coldplay
Vol. 52: Alicia Keys
Vol. 53: Stone Temple Pilots
Vol. 54: David Bowie
Vol. 55: The Eagles
Vol. 56: The Beatles
Vol. 57: Beyonce
Vol. 58: Beanie Sigel
Vol. 59: A Tribe Called Quest
Vol. 60: Cheap Trick
Vol. 61: Guns N' Roses
Vol. 62: The Posies
Vol. 63: The Time
Vol. 64: Gucci Mane
Vol. 65: Violent Femmes
Vol. 66: Red Hot Chili Peppers
Vol. 67: Maxwell
Vol. 68: Parliament-Funkadelic
Vol. 69: Chevelle
Vol. 70: Ray Parker Jr. and Raydio
Vol. 71: Fantasia
Vol. 72: Heart
Vol. 73: Pitbull
Vol. 74: Nas
Vol. 75: Monica
Vol. 76: The Cars
Vol. 77: 112
Vol. 78: 2Pac
Vol. 79: Nelly
Vol. 80: Meat Loaf
Vol. 81: AC/DC
Vol. 82: Bruce Springsteen
Vol. 83: Pearl Jam

This entry was posted on Friday, October 28, 2016 at 12:33 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.