While each artist puts their mind and soul into their albums, the finished product isn’t always something they remember with pride and joy. Many musicians have at least one record they don’t particularly like, and some publicly revealed what was wrong with their release. Though it can be related to the band’s dynamic, the recording sessions, or a technical problem, albums sometimes don’t work out for a band.
In Green Day’s case, they released thirteen studio albums during their career, and each received praise and criticism. Although not everybody would call their sixth studio album, ‘Warning,’ their worst work, it received mixed criticism and a low commercial slump on top of being leaked onto Napster three weeks before its release. All these elements prevent the album from getting a top spot in Green Day’s music catalog, and there’s more.
The band’s frontman Billie Joe Armstrong felt some type of way about ‘Warning,’ regardless of the album’s gold certification after selling over 1.2 million copies in 2012 with 3.5 million copies sold worldwide. Moreover, the musician had a few statements about it, implying that the band wasn’t doing their best around the time they released the record on October 3, 2000.
“The only time I ever really felt like that was sometime around ‘Warning,’” said Armstrong when Billboard asked if he ever considered leaving or ending the band. “It was a time where we had to evaluate our situation and our relationship as a band and truly get into making the records of our dreams.” However, the singer admitted that he never considered leaving the band unless somebody died, saying, “But quitting? Nah. Nobody leaves this band unless it’s in a coffin.”
Many years after its release, Billie Joe Armstrong talked about Green Day’s ‘Warning’ once again. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the singer opened up about 15 songs from the band’s entire career. One of these tracks was ‘Warning’s lead single ‘Minority.’ About their 2000 album, Armstrong said, “I’d like to go back and re-record that album.”
Apparently, the musician wanted something different for a re-release as he continued, “I want to go back and just do everything more live because I think ‘Minority’ live is a lot better than it came out on the album. But that’s just one of those things that you think about too much.”
During the interview, Armstrong reflected further on their record and said, “I started playing more acoustic guitar, and I really wanted to have more for ‘Warning.’ And there was also a lot of kind of bad pop-punk that was starting to happen, and I wanted to go against that genre. This felt like the next step.”
The band showed with ‘Warning’ that making another punk record was the last thing they wanted to do at the time. They embraced an experimental folk-punk and pop-punk attitude, allowing them to invent new music styles. Yet, the band members are not satisfied with the final putout.
