Kerplunk

Product Information

I always thought that this song was about him going off to college. He’s left his home and moved off to college and he is unsure of himself and his new surroundings. The whole slums thing is about how most parents think that college housing is slums but the teenagers see it as paradise. I dunno, that’s just what i always thought he was talking about.” John Kiffmeyer, a.k.a. Al Sobrante – drums on "Sweet Children", "Best Thing in Town", "Strangeland" and "My Generation" We really wanted to make our records sound like us, but a bigger version of it,” Armstrong said in 2006. “We’d seen what had happened to so many other bands before. Throughout the Eighties, if a punk band signed to a major label, it always seemed like they compromised their sound, and we didn’t want to do that”.

The song is filled with the spirit of the album expressing the difficulties of realizations of one's mistakes and self-deception. The narrator takes the blame for his actions and admits everything he's done wrong - but he can't change anything, and once again he's left without an answer to the one question that keeps dwelling in his mind: "Why?" Revisiting the band’s attitude towards their craft as young upstarts, he added: “But when it came to music, they were Very Serious Indeed. I was working with a lot of young bands in those days, and one thing I constantly struggled with was getting musicians to strike the right balance between having fun and making the most of their musical abilities.

Jenkins, Craig (April 22, 2021). "The Best and Most Misunderstood of Green Day, According to Billie Joe Armstrong". Vulture . Retrieved April 28, 2022. Like many other songs on this album, One of My Lies is about the doubts and realizations associated with growing up. The narrator admits that he used to have naive self-centered views on life, he thought that he was the most important thing in the world and his life was priceless. But now he's realizing that he's just as small as everyone else and has the same flaws and doubts - he's not special, and now he's woken up to understand it. In his rage caused by these realizations, he's stating that no one else is special either - we're all small and disposable, and no one knows the answers to his questions. The narrator in this song expresses his fear of growing up and turning into someone who has to plan out everything they do. He sees that his friends are ageing and realizes that this will inevitably happen to him too. He doesn't express a certain opinion - he simply looks at both sides of the problem and tries to figure out what to do. He's saying that he doesn't want to live a planned out life, but wants to stay spontaneous and have fun for as long as he can. Yet, he's saying that sometimes he unintentionally hurts people with who he is, and that makes him wonder whether he should somehow change, have a plan for life, grow up. He's wondering whether what he's doing with his life is right. Green Day - Kerplunk!". Epitaph Records. Archived from the original on 2008-09-16 . Retrieved January 26, 2023. That’s another part of the story that’s worth talking about: Kerplunk sold 50,000 copies by the end of 1992, making it by far the biggest release Lookout! Records had ever produced. Despite including a letter of loyalty to Lookout on their debut 39/Smooth, the band released they had hit a ceiling with the independent label. Upon their signing to Reprise Records, Green Day were excommunicated from their roots: barred from Gillman, shunned by hometown friends, and viciously insulted in fan zines proclaiming them as the worst thing a ’90s band could be – sell outs.

Words I Might Have Ate was about Nina. She broke my heart. I was a shitty boyfriend. The 'school grounds' was a school we hung out at and smoked weed and made out and stuff. Oh to be young."

Track listing

The song was inspired by Armstrong's relationship with Adrienne Nesser, his future wife, who at that time lived in Minnesota, while he lived in California. Obviously, being so far away from her made him miss her a lot, and 2,000 Light Years Away is one of the songs that he wrote to express his feelings towards her. The number 2,000 is probably based on the actual distance between the lovers (it's also mentioned in another song about Armstrong's wife - Westbound Sign: "is tragedy 2,000 miles away?") - the actual location between their hometowns is a lot less than 2,000 miles*, but the author roughly approximated the distance because obviously, when you are apart from someone you love, it seems like they are worlds away, even if it's just a few hundred miles. In this song, the narrator is wondering what will happen to him when he grows older. He starts off with thinking about an old man he saw - he sees that his man didn't succeed in life and realizes that this can happen to anyone. He wonders what this man was dreaming of when he was younger. Everyone has dreams of a great future, but it doesn't mean those dreams will come true - in fact, you might end up "wearing woman's shoes and being crazy" like this old man.