What would it sound like if Green Day's 1997 single Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) was given the pop-punk treatment for Dookie instead?
YouTuber Sz.G. Music has cleverly reworked Green Day's 1997 mega-ballad Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life) into a song that could sit perfectly on 1994 breakthrough album Dookie.
Of course, Billie Joe Armstrong had actually penned the classic single around the time of writing Dookie, but held off on releasing it for many years because he "didn’t think it was going to be for Green Day at all," he told Rolling Stone.
Read this: How Green Day’s Dookie captured the spirit of a generation
"Then when we were doing [1995's] Insomniac, I did a demo for it, but it wasn’t right for that album, either," he added. "I didn’t really know what to do. When we made Nimrod, I was just like, 'Let’s see what happens.' We put this little string quartet on it, which was going way outside what Green Day was known for. And it was amazing. It opened up a brand-new world: 'Oh, fuck, we can do so much more.'"
Now, thanks to this more high-energy, pop-punk-esque take on the single, it would have worked brilliantly on Dookie…
Last year, the frontman admitted to Kerrang! that he thought people would "fucking hate" Good Riddance at first.
"Doing something like Good Riddance was terrifying for me, to put myself out there and be that vulnerable," Billie Joe said. "I thought people were probably gonna fucking hate it, you know? But I think the way that it resonated with people, I was able to kind of go, 'Okay, now I’ve really accomplished something that was a shift.’ And, as an artist, I felt more empowered that I could keep doing my thing without having to feel like I had to please everybody."
