“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Green Day

"Boulevard of Broken Dreams" sits fourth in the running order of American Idiot, Green Day's seventh album, and Reprise sent it out as the record's second single on November 29, 2004. It arrives right after "Holiday", and if that song is the party, this is the hangover: the album's hero, Jesus of Suburbia, coming down from his high in The City and finding nothing but gloom waiting for him.

Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the words and the whole band built the music, with Rob Cavallo producing alongside Green Day and Chris Lord-Alge handling the mix. It's a midtempo power ballad that trudges where you'd expect it to sprint, bleak and brooding, with a chorus big enough to fill a stadium and a mood dark enough to empty one.

It turned into the band's biggest US hit, stalling only at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, and it moved more than 5 million copies around the world, enough to rank ninth among the decade's best-selling singles. It took Record of the Year at the Grammys and Video of the Year at the MTV Video Music Awards, a double no other song had pulled off as of 2026, and Rolling Stone's readers voted it their top single of the decade in 2009.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.