The American Dream Is Killing Me

“With a song like ‘The American Dream Is Killing Me,’ I address things like homelessness and QAnon and everything that’s under the umbrella of what the American Dream is supposed to be—and how it just doesn’t work and it’s a broken country right now.

– Billie Joe Armstrong

MIXOnline: The caustic “The American Dream Is Killing Me” may have been the opening track and first single, but the anthem nearly wasn’t recorded, having initially been written and then set aside during sessions for the band’s previous album, 2020’s Father of All….

“We were going for something completely different then,” says Armstrong. “I didn’t want to be political; that wasn’t really the message we were trying to do. We were wanting to do something more garage rock back then—but as time went on, it just seemed like ‘American Dream’ was fitting in with the new album perfectly.” Now Armstrong sees that song and the album’s title track, written during the darkest days of the pandemic, as “two sides of the same coin, or two sides of the same single. It felt perfect and when I played the demo for Rob, he was like, ‘Man, we should really record this.’”