Artist:

Green Day

Album:

American Idiot

Composer(s):

Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, Tré Cool

Lyricist(s):

Billie Joe Armstrong

The California power trio is a very unusual example of a band that successfully reinvented itself. They became huge with the single Basket Case off the 1994 album Dookie in typical punk fashion, then drifted off into a relative anonymousness until they hit the big time again in 2004 with the pop rock masterpiece American Idiot, that was recently turned into a musical. Billy Joe Armstrong is a modern master of huge-sounding simple and proficient riffs.