18

Jesus of Suburbia
Green Day
2004

Another one that promises to be controversial.  Look, I love Dookie too!  What an incredible album.  Though, strangely, almost everyone went with Basket Case or Welcome to Paradise, when the correct answer there should’ve been When I Come Around.  Honestly, I could’ve gone with any song off the album and it would’ve been the right pick.

But instead of 35-year-old Dookie, I’m going with something off of 25-year-old American Idiot instead.  Which is an amazing album in its own right and arguably even better than Dookie.  Not many artists have been able to successfully pull off a “rock opera” album; even fewer (perhaps only this one) have been able to do a successful punk rock opera album.  And the entire album is a banger from start to finish.  

What I love about this song in particular is that it’s a three-part song that is the equivalent of “Bohemian Rhapsody” for punk rock.  It’s extremely hard to pull this off but this is a masterpiece — the journey of this one flows extremely well.  The energy is fantastic start to finish.  Tre Cool’s drums are epic.  Seriously, the whole thing is amazing and in addition to it being my Green Day pick, I think it’s their best song, which is saying a lot.

One final cherished family memory with this one:  this song came out when Tyler was two years old.  He was probably 3 or maybe 4 when he started changing the lyric of the line, “I don’t care if you don’t / I don’t care if you don’t / I don’t care if you don’t care” to “I got a kid in Utah.”  Check it out - not really what Billie Joe was intending, but it definitely sounds like “I got a kid in Utah” and you can’t unhear it once you do!

Other Songs Considered:
Too many to list, but personal favorites: When I Come Around, Basket Case, She, Pulling Teeth, Good Riddance (Time of Your Life), American Idiot, Holiday, Warning, Minority, Hold On, Castaway, Brutal Love, The Forgotten, and many, many more