Have I talked about my Green Day obsession of 2005? I must have referred to it at some point. By that year, American Idiot had been out for a few months already. But it was seeing the music video for ‘Holiday’ one morning on MTV2 that got me properly interested in the band. I went to their website, watched all of their music videos that were available on there. Green Day became my new favourite musical group. Now that they were, I found myself researching anything and everything I could about them. This lead to me to various fansites, one in particular, GreenDayAuthority.com. Haven’t been on that site in years. It’s changed a lot. This is how I remember it. If you click on that link, you’ll see there’s a “Didja Know?” link on the left-hand side. That was my introduction starter pack. There’s a note about the band having ‘transitional songs’. I could guess what that meant ’cause I got American Idiot for my 10th birthday. They were songs that went into each other without interruption. The album introduced me to that concept. I thought it was cool. ‘Uptight’ was mentioned in that transitional songs list, going into ‘Last Ride In’. I needed to hear it somehow.

But this was 2005. Sure, file sharing places like Limewire and Soulseek were probably around. I didn’t know about them. So the only way I heard ‘Uptight’ was through a 30-second sample of it on a site called artistdirect.com, which I’m very sure has been dead for a good few years now. I believe it started right at the end of the song’s first verse and ended just before the chorus started. Fantastic. I liked what I heard, though. Billie Joe Armstrong’s vocal melody sounded nice. I’m sure that I heard the song in full not long after on another Green Day fansite, probably 2006. And yes, the sound of waves that are at the beginning of ‘Last Ride In’ do start in the very final seconds of ‘Uptight’. But it wasn’t until 2009 that I downloaded Nimrod. It was on a file sharing site – whose name I can’t remember – and I believe I downloaded the songs one-by-one. Years had passed. 21st Century Breakdown was now out, and I guess its release got me thinking about GreenDayAuthority.com and how a lot of trivia on that Didja Know page were in association with Nimrod. Seemed like an interesting album to dig into. I had Dookie, American Idiot, International Superhits! and 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours on CD. I was a year into having a YouTube channel where all I did was upload albums. Why not get a hold of another Green Day record, albeit in a considerably less legal way?

‘Uptight’ is the ninth song on Nimrod. Coming after the venomous ‘Platypus (I Hate You)’, the opening of ‘Uptight’ feels like such an alleviation in pressure. The tempo’s still quick, but it’s much less a barrage of sound. Then Billie Joe Armstrong starts singing, you hear what he’s saying, and you realise that even though the music’s nicer to the ears, the subject matter’s just as much a downer as what came before. You see, nothing’s going right for the narrator in ‘Uptight’, I don’t think the words need too much explaining, and they find themselves staying awake all night contemplating suicide. That’s the gist. How the song grabs you is by how catchy it is. The track is a very upbeat (musically) song about perhaps killing oneself, that’s for sure. It also has a very simple structure too. Two verses and the chorus that’s near repeated until the song’s end bar the instrumental break. Some people may not like that the last half of the track is essentially repetitions of the chorus. I don’t mind it at all. The melody gets stuck in your head that way. I can only think that ‘Last Ride In’ was purposefully placed afterwards to really bring a lift to the album’s proceedings, a sense of calm after the two negatively-minded tales that come before it. Album flow at its finest. Furthermore, they’ve never played the song live. It’s a shame. I imagine it’s ’cause of the depressing lyrics.