“Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day

"Wake Me Up When September Ends" is the moment American Idiot, Green Day's seventh studio album, stops shouting and lowers its head. Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the words about his father, who died in September 1982, and about the life he has lived since, though plenty of listeners have also heard it as a lament for the people lost, and the people left behind, in the September 11 attacks.

It starts on a lone acoustic guitar before an electric guitar and bells roll in, with Mike Dirnt on bass and Tré Cool on drums joining Armstrong for a slow, heavy build; the three of them share the music credit. Rob Cavallo produced it with the band at Ocean Way Recording, and Chris Lord-Alge mixed it.

Issued as the album's fourth single in 2005, it climbed to number six on the Billboard Hot 100 and went platinum in the US and four times over in Canada. Samuel Bayer's video played it as a mini-movie, with Jamie Bell and Evan Rachel Wood as a young couple pulled apart when he joins the Marines and ships out to the Iraq War, and it went to number one on Total Request Live. Reactions were mixed at first, but it has since come to be counted among Green Day's best, and every year, as September winds down, it comes back around.

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