Westbound Sign ➵ Billie Joe Armstrong

Greetings from Plymouth Rock

Collin

The house was dead quiet. The kind of quiet that creeps under your skin and makes your own heartbeat sound too loud. My parents were both working late, Erin was off preoccupied, and I hadn't spoken to another human being all day, and I liked it that way.

I was sitting on the floor of my room, laundry half sorted, drawers half open, a sock in my lap I'd already folded and unfolded three times. But my brain wasn't on socks. It was somewhere else entirely.

Dookie played through my headphones, the tape in my walkman whirring like a second heartbeat. I wasn't just listening...I was absorbing.

Track by track. Lyric by lyric.

Trying to crawl inside the sound and find the parts that belonged to Billie. Not the version of him from interviews or hotel lobbies or lit up onstage but the one underneath all that. The one who maybe didn't know how to say certain things unless it was with a guitar screaming in the background.

His voice on the album wasn't polished. It was feral. Unhinged, even. Like he'd clawed the words straight out of his throat and didn't bother to clean them up on the way out. Some songs sounded like they were being spit out mid breakdown, and others like they were ripped from a journal he never meant anyone to read.

I couldn't stop listening.

The angrier he got, the more I leaned in. Not because I liked the anger exactly, but because it felt real. Unapologetic. Billie didn't pretend he was fine, or clean, or emotionally tidy. He was messy. Loud. Bitter in ways I recognized. Like maybe he knew something about the things I couldn't say either.

Pulling Teeth came on again, I rewinded it like I was doing with every song before moving onto the next. I stopped folding completely. Just sat there with my hands in my lap, listening. That sarcasm - almost cartoonish on the surface, felt like a trap door. Like the more he joked, the more it covered something that wasn't funny at all.

I remembered what he said that night in the hallway. The look on his face. How quick he was to change the subject after he mentioned her. Like the words burned even on the way out.

I turned the volume up.

Was this about that relationship? The one that left scars he didn't name? It felt like a yes. Not literally, but emotionally. The song didn't sound like heartbreak. It sounded like survival. Like laughing while you bleed just to keep from sobbing.

There was a wildness to all of it. Billie didn't just sing.

He ripped.

And I was fascinated.

The way someone might be with a storm rolling in over an open field: a little scared, completely captivated.

I lay back against the floor, arms spread wide, headphones pressing tight against my ears. I didn't want to be here, not really. I wanted to be in the middle of that noise caught in the space between what he was screaming and what he wasn't saying. I wanted to know what it was like to burn that loud and still walk away.

I rewound it.

Started again.

Let his voice rip through the silence one more time.

The tape hissed softly between tracks. I hit rewind. That low, ghost breath of silence before the same explosion of Billie's voice cracked through the headphones. I lay there on the floor, eyes fixed on the ceiling, arms heavy at my sides. Clothes still scattered. Daylight starting to dull at the corners of the room.

I had nowhere to be, and no one I wanted to see.

Each time, I tried to catch something I hadn't before. A breath between lines. A crack in his voice. A lyric I'd brushed off the first time that now sounded like a confession.