Billie Joe Armstrong has opened up about struggling with alcohol during Green Day‘s Hella Mega tour with Fall Out Boy and Weezer.
“What got me back into drinking was that sort of fear of missing out,” Armstrong, who previously went to rehab for substance abuse in 2012, tells Vulture. “I felt like I was alone. AA was difficult for me because, especially in the Bay Area, there’s the one word, anonymous. It was hard for me to maintain my anonymity. That was the struggle for the five years I was sober.”
“I was out drinking again for a few years and then I just realized I was just unhealthy: My mental health was falling down the drain, getting the shakes,” he continues. “And then I was like, ‘F*** this, I feel messy right now.’ The only thing alcohol was doing for me was getting in the way of the things I wanted to do and the person I wanted to be.”
Armstrong adds that he now has a “great set of sober friends,” which he didn’t have during his previous stint of sobriety.
“I’m older, I’m wiser,” he says. “I have different things that make me happy. I don’t need to be out all night getting f***** up.”
Armstrong wrote about his experience on the Green Day song “Dilemma,” which appears on the band’s upcoming new album, Saviors.
“They’re the most honest lyrics I’ve ever written in my life,” Armstrong says of “Dilemma.” “Straight up, the chorus is ‘I was sober, now I’m drunk again.’ I don’t think anybody is that honest with themselves about their cause of suffering and what kind of anxiety they’re going through. I think that song captures it.”
Saviors drops January 19.