Green Day made American Idiot in 2004 after a false start that would have ended a lesser band. They had finished a different record, Cigarettes and Valentines, when the master tapes were stolen from their Oakland studio. Rather than re-record it, they walked away and wrote something far more ambitious in its place.

What came out was a full-blown rock opera, a punk concept album with a storyline and recurring characters at a moment when nobody expected one from anybody, let alone from the Dookie band. It follows a disaffected kid, the Jesus of Suburbia, out of the suburbs and into the city, through love and self-destruction and back again, stitched together with two nine-minute song suites.

Reprise released it in September 2004 into the middle of an American election year, and its anger landed. It went to number one, sold in the tens of millions, won the Grammy for Best Rock Album, and was later turned into a Broadway musical. It is the album that holds “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, the quiet center of all that noise. Press play and listen to the part most people never quite hear.