"That was really the first time we attempted a ballad," Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong told SPIN in 2010. "The first time we ever played that song was during an encore in New Jersey — I had to pound a beer backstage to get up the courage. I knew we were gonna take a tomato to the face." The snotty punks left this tune off their 1994 breakthrough, Dookie, for sounding too different from the rest of their repertoire, but it was eventually released on the 1997 album Nimrod and quickly became a pop culture touchstone, soundtracking Seinfeld's 1998 farewell broadcast as well as countless graduation ceremonies.
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