Green Day says that the title track of the band’s upcoming 12th album Revolution Radio was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement.
In an interview on Rolling Stone‘s “Music Now” podcast, Billie Joe Armstrong says that the idea for “Revolution Radio” came after Armstrong found himself swept up in a BLM protest in New York City.
“I was in a car coming from Brooklyn to Manhattan and there was these protesters for Ferguson holding up traffic all the way back across the bridge,” he said. “I got to where I was staying at and I could see on 8th Avenue there was all the protesters out there and I was just looking out and I wrote about it the day after.”
Armstrong says he later walked into the protest to see it from ground level.
“I walked out and marched with people a little bit but I was mostly kind of observing and seeing what was happening,” he said. “It’s a trip to watch people just completely rebel against the old order or whatever you want to call it and get to something that’s more pure. There was this controlled chaos that was going on and it was happening all over the country.”
Interviews like this and Armstrong’s recent comments on Donald Trump bode well for Radio. A politically tuned-in Green Day gave us their second-best album, after all. Without something to rail against, we get dreck like “Know Your Enemy.”
Revolution Radio is out on October 7.
(Via NME)
