Green Day ¡Tre! on LP The Third & Final Installment of Green Day's Epic New Trilogy on Reprise Records! “You’re on this journey,” Warner Bros. Records Chairman Rob Cavallo told Green Day frontman/songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong. “Keep writing.” It was Cavallo’s second trip in a few weeks to the Bay Area, where Armstrong once again played him song after dazzling song. Plenty of great material had piled up already, but the modern-rock hitmaker was clearly on fire and Cavallo, who signed the band in the ’90s and produced most of their albums (including the Diamond-certified Dookie and sextuple-platinum monster American Idiot), didn’t want to interfere with the process. “We weren’t under any pressure to turn in the record quickly,” he points out. “So I said, ‘If you’re feeling it, keep going.’” Armstrong had been traveling, most notably to New York, where he appeared in American Idiot on Broadway. Inspired by the creative energy there and other in ports of call, he found that the songs just started pouring out. The result of this prolific phase is three new Green Day albums, ¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tré! which will see staggered releases between late-2012 and early-2013. The hook-heavy, relentlessly uptempo ¡Uno! and its infectious lead single, “Oh Love,” brings the band’s first new material to the airwaves since 2009’s 21st Century Breakdown. “At first we thought of releasing them in a three-week period, one per week,” Cavallo recalls. “We did a lot of research.” He credits the marketing department, which was understandably daunted, at first, by the prospect of bringing so much product to the marketplace in so short a span, for its diligence. “They discovered if you tie in schedules, singles, touring, international, licensing, brand partners and so on, the best thing to do was space them out six or seven weeks apart.” It didn’t hurt that the material was so strong; the WBR staffers who spoke to me about the albums tended to sound more like geeked-out superfans than industry veterans. ¡Tré! is arguably the most ambitious of the three albums, tying together tasty, irresistible pop-rock like “Missing You" and “Sex, Drugs and Violence”; the string-laden, gospel-tinged “Brutal Love”; the pivoting suite “Dirty Rotten Bastards” (which Cavallo likens to Idiot’s “Jesus of Suburbia”); the Occupy-worthy anthem “99 Revolutions”; and the cinematic, Beatlesque finale, “The Forgotten,” which ends the odyssey on a gorgeously affirmative note. “Don’t look away,” Armstrong sings on that uplifting closer, “from the arms of love.” - Greenday.com/Simon Glickman/Hits Daily Double Green Day ¡Tre! Track Listing: 1. Brutal Love 2. Missing You 3. 8th Avenue Serenade 4. Drama Queen 5. X-Kid 6. Sex, Drugs & Violence 7. A Little Boy Named Train 8. Amanda 9. Walk Away 10. Dirty Rotten Bastards 11. 99 Revolutions 12. The Forgotten |