Anyone remember the Green Day: Rock Band game? Came as a shock to me when it was initially announced in 2010. It was so close to the Beatles game that had been out for only over half a year at the time, and I like Green Day but I also felt there would have been so many more classic rock bands Harmonix could have dedicated a Rock Band game to. Like Led Zeppelin, or The Who or something. Green Day was a cool choice, though. I wasn’t complaining. I got the game. It was fun to play through the whole of American Idiot, Dookie, a large majority of 21st Century Breakdown and other well-known Green Day songs. Green Day was my favourite band for a while in 2005. By 2010, I’d had physical copies of Dookie, American Idiot, International Superhits… even 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours for years. But I think it was the release of this game that provided the impetus to dive deeper into the band’s discography as the year went on.

One day I came upon Insomniac, the band’s pissed-off, harder rocking follow-up to Dookie, the band’s big breakthrough album that had only been released a year before. It’s my favourite album of theirs because of the previously listed adjectives. I was well-acquainted with the singles from there, which I never fell out of love with, and the other songs on there were just more of the same. ‘Tight Wad Hill’ is the second-last number on Insomniac. I’ve been around Green Day forums and Reddit pages, and it looked to me that whenever there’s a ranking going on ‘Tight Wad…’ is the tune that’s always rated the worst or the least best. I remember liking it off the rip. Before then, I’d read about how it was almost the title track of the album before the bandmembers decided on ‘Insomniac’, so I reckoned it must have been considered a bit of an important song amongst the band during the album’s making.

Reasons I could think of, though. It follows the musical pattern of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-instrumental break-chorus that’s damn near on every other song on the album. The song details the depressing experiences of a drug addict, and that’s already covered with ‘Geek Stink Breath’, which also provides a more personal level of perspective. It’s also near the album’s end, so listeners are probably just waiting to see how the whole thing officially finishes. But it’s fast, it hits hard – Tré Cool’s pounding away on his drum set – it’s heavy, makes me wanna scrunch my face up. Billie Joe Armstrong’s sings an infectious melody with a snotty snarl, and Mike Dirnt’s playing some very cool lines on the bass guitar. And that’s Insomniac all over. ‘Tight Wad Hill’ does the job, it’s a great representative. Just a shame the band rarely play anything from this album. Insomniac appreciators out there, I’m with you.