Read this: Green Day: The inside story of Insomniac
Reflecting on the success of Dookie and being thrust into the spotlight ahead of the release of Insomniac, frontman Billie Joe Armstrong told Kerrang! this year, “It was completely uncomfortable. I was completely out of my comfort zone, because it was all chaos. It was like every day this thing was getting bigger and bigger. It was really exciting, but it was also really stressful, because you suddenly go from doing everything yourselves and sleeping on floors, and then suddenly it was like everybody was in a frenzy to get to me, Mike [Dirnt, bass] and Tré [Cool, drums]. It was just nuts – it was a crazy time.”
The vocalist/guitarist also detailed that time period in an interview with pop megastar Billie Eilish last year, explaining how the stress of it all fed into Insomniac in a big way.
“I was sort of lost at sea,” he said. “There’s extreme highs, and you’re playing to a new audience really excited to hear you. But I think what was really important to me was being real. I think I worried about that too much, the part where you’re thinking, ‘I need to stay rooted at all costs.’ Sometimes I would get very hardheaded about that. And the record after that, Insomniac, was a really dark record. I was pretty numb to everything.”
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