39/Smooth: “I Was There” / “Disappearing Boy”

The Playlist is my Sisyphean attempt to review every song in an artist’s catalog.

“I WAS THERE”

Here we have the one and only Green Day song written by drummer John Kiffmeyer. And no disrespect, but it kinda shows. “I Was There” is a song about remembering all the good times in your life and wishing you could go back. It has a very “graduating senior looking through his yearbook” kinda vibe. Hey, we all gotta start somewhere.

And I think the band knows how thin it is? They really amp up the skate punk vibe and pump this thing full of energy to keep it from getting too sentimental and mushy.

This feels like a quintessential Green Day song, if maybe a little rough around the edges. Billie Joe’s vocal style is already set in stone, the harmonies on the chorus really click. It’s all there. The arpeggiation in the guitars sounds pretty clumsy, but again, it’s a start.

The repeated “I Was There” chorus was designed to be screamed along at concerts at the top of your lungs. This was a band who knew exactly what room they were playing to.

“DISAPPEARING BOY“

Billie Joe Armstrong is apparently the youngest of six children. That fact alone explains this song, which is about Billie Joe’s crippling social anxiety and feeling invisible among other people. The song opens by depicting how lost and isolated he felt as a child, before showing what kind of person he grew up into.

And then at one point, we seem to get a reprise of the dynamic in “At The Library”, where our narrator see’s his crush and her boyfriend, and is so overcome with anxiety about it that he wants to disappear.

In that room I see her
I see her and she’s with him
I turn around and then I’m gone

“Disappearing Boy” – Green Day

I do enjoy how the band tries to slow things down for a poignant moment during the bridge, but the band is just so energetic and ready to blast off that they can’t sustain it. Before the moment even passes, Kiffmeyer slams out a drum fill, snapping everyone out of it, and they’re off to the races again. It’s kinda cute. Billie Joe may have felt invisible to everyone around him, but that wasn’t going to last much longer.