California punk revivalists, Green Day, made it onto our radars in the early 90s with their album Dookie - singing about a lack of motivation and being melodramatic fools. The album sold over 11 million copies internationally. 2005, however, was their best year ever as the Most Played Artist (reported by MediaBase) and just what the country needed to remind us every time we turned on the radio that our right to freedom of expression, whether it is for or against the majority, is what makes America great.

Green Day has reigned as the nation's pop-punk kings since American Idiot, the band's ninth studio effort, was released September 21, 2004; having debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, won the Grammy for Best Rock Album, and an impressive 7 Man on the Moon MTV awards.

American Idiot is a full 57-minute punk rock-opera, complete with a complex and political story line, as well as characters that include Jesus of Suburbia and St. Timothy - individuals who confront a host of social issues in what some consider to be their angriest album ever.

And timing is everything. The album hit the streets just weeks before our country would vote to either re-elect George W. Bush, our incumbent - the President who was seen as "tough" and had waged a War on Terror - or elect a new leader in Senator John Kerry, who promised to be "Stronger at home, and respected in the world."

The former punk brats of Green Day (whose name is derived from an expression for a day of pot smoking) took the state of their nation to heart and exercised their freedom of speech in the lyrics and their onstage antics while touring for American Idiot. The band filmed and recorded two concerts at the Milton Keynes National Bowl in England - the two biggest shows of their career playing for over130,000 fans. These recordings were released as a live CD & DVD Bullet in a Bible on November 15, 2005.

What is interesting however, is that if it weren't for a strange twist of fate, this album may never have been made. With nearly 20 songs for a new album recorded, the members of Green Day were in the process of mixing the tracks when they arrived to their Berkeley studio to find that all their master tapes had been stolen. They did have material on CD, but it just wasn't the same. They halted efforts on that album and made the decision to start over - taking that frustrated energy into new material, and establishing their own musical boundaries. The band gives credit to their influences The Clash and David Bowie in an MTV interview for driving their ambition to putting everything they had into this project; without letting the fear of failure limit their creativity.

At the same time they began work on this new body of material, the U.S. invaded Iraq providing a dominant theme for what would eventually become American Idiot.

The album does break away from the political agenda when Armstrong, for the first time in his career, incorporates how he dealt with his father's death.

While Armstrong writes all the lyrics on the album, each member faced his own challenge growing up in the suburbs of the East Bay that could easily have translated into the characters in American Idiot. The boys might have been singing Welcome to Paradise in 1994, but paradise is hardly a word representative of the life they knew. Billie Joe lost his father to cancer of the esophagus when he was only 10, and Mike Dirnt, (born Michael Pritchard); having been abandoned by a heroin-addicted mother as an infant, had to suffer through his adoptive parents divorce when he was only 7.

Clearly things are different for the now thirty-somethings. Not only is the world looking to them for inspiration, they are finding ways to capitalize on it. For Armstrong, he and -time wife Adrienne, launched the Adeline record label and clothing line to help scout new talent and outfit the punks of tomorrow.

Band demands usually take a toll on personal relationships and so it is no surprise that the marriages of Armstrong's two other band mates had casualties. Tre Cool (born Frank Edwin Right III)has been through two divorces already, and Dirnt one. Dirnt stays close to his East Bay roots and owns a restaurant called Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe' in Emeryville ( next door to Berkeley), named after a song by The Clash.

It's hard to imagine these three forces maintaining any semblance of a normal life, and in their DVD, they share how challenging it is. But for the masses who have embraced the band's honesty, in-your-face politics and inspiration from their music, Green Day has been for some, a solution for a difficult problem with what is going on in the world. That silver bullet.