Green Day's New "Power-Pop" Album

12/02/08 1:15pm

by Jen White (CHARTattack)

Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong has hinted that the band's next album will be to the tune of power pop.

"I really like fucking with arrangements, and I always try to look at the possibilities of how you write power-pop music," the frontman told Altpress.com.

"How do you take something — and it could be anything from the Creation and The Who to The Beatles to Cheap Trick to The Jam — and try to expand on the idea of what is supposed to be three-chord mayhem? And how do you do it in a way where the arrangements are just unpredictable? So I'm pushing myself to be progressive in songwriting and being a songwriter.

"With this record, the feeling's been that you've got to just go for it."

The band are working in a Hollywood studio on the follow-up to 2004's American Idiot with Garbage drummer and producer Butch Vig (Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins), who Armstrong says has "a lot of integrity and a lot of class."

"He's not a cheerleader type of producer; he's just a very hard-working, straightforward guy. He wasn't trying to change our style or anything; he just was really getting into the process, and everyone was kind of just coming together and bouncing ideas off each other and just getting really in-depth with the arrangements and the lyrics and stuff like that."

No title or release date has yet been revealed, but the album is expected to drop in 2009.

Green Day's latest release was actually under another moniker. Foxboro Hot Tubs released their Stop Drop And Roll!!! debut last spring. Armstrong says it was a very different songwriting and recording experience for the band members.

"The Foxboro Hot Tubs record we did this year was, like, fly by the seat of your pants and just go. But I am allowing time, allowing for the process to happen naturally without having to force it. And that is a painstaking process, let me tell you. It's miserable."

Check out the painstaking process in this behind-the-scenes studio video that was shot in October: