The Meaning of Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends”
Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends” is a moody, heartfelt song that Billie Joe Armstrong wrote about his late father, who died of esophageal cancer when the singer/guitarist was just ten years old, on September 10th, 1982.
The story goes that Billie Joe first came up with the title for this song in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, as he locked himself in his room for hours upon returning home from the funeral. When his mother finally came to knock on the door, he said “Wake Me Up When September Ends”.
Released in 2005 as a single from Green Day’s seventh album, American Idiot, the song was dedicated to the Hurricane Katrina victims that August (with a live version released as a benefit on September 3rd), and is also seen as a dedication to the victims of the September 11th attacks.
“Wake Me Up When September Ends” was a chart-topping success in the rock world, and even peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100, making it their second top ten hit after “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” from the same album hit number two earlier that year.
“Wake Me Up When September Ends” Origins
During a 2019 interview on the Howard Stern Show, Billie recounts the story behind “Wake Me Up When September Ends”, including how he remembered the song’s title so many years after the passing of his father:
I think it’s something that just stayed with me; the month of September being that anniversary that always is just, I don’t know, kind of a bummer. I think about him every day, really. I kinda avoided writing about him for many years, and then finally having a breakthrough like that felt good. It wasn’t like a negative emotion so much, but it was just kind of like honoring him.
Billie Joe Armstrong on the meaning of “Wake Me Up When September Ends”.
Knowing the depth of emotion that fueled the songwriting process, it’s easy to see why this song has had such a powerful impact on so many people. The lyrics were penned from a genuine place, mourning the loss of something that did not deserve to be taken, and the turmoil that follows in the aftermath.
“Wake Me Up When September Ends” Lyrics Meaning
With all of this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at the lyrics, starting with the first verse:
Summer has come and passed
First verse to “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day.
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when September ends
Like my father’s come to pass
Seven years has gone so fast
Wake me up when September ends
Armstrong’s lyrics start by placing us in space-time, right at the end of summer, just as the title suggests. Like everything else that’s good in life, it can never last forever, and the fading of summer is used as a metaphor for loss here.
Then, Billie Joe references his father’s passing, followed by the first stop in the autobiographical timeline, which is seven years later. This is when Billie Joe Armstrong met Green Day’s bassist Mike Dirnt and together they formed the band Sweet Children, who would later change their name to Green Day.
As Armstrong told Howard Stern, he is reminded of his father every day, but the downpour of emotions is strongest during the month of September, when it happened. This is what he sings about in the chorus:
Here comes the rain again
Chorus to “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day.
Falling from the stars
Drenched in my pain again
Becoming who we are
As my memory rests
But never forgets what I lost
Wake me up when September ends
Billie Joe may grow and change, but the lyrics here show that he will never forget the pain he felt when he lost his father. When September comes around, he’s ready to hibernate until the end of the month, to avoid feeling this way.
“Here Comes the Rain Again”
It’s also of note that the line “Here comes the rain again / Falling from the stars” is a reference to Eurythmics, Annie Lennox, and Dave Stewart’s 1983 hit “Here Comes The Rain Again”, which contains the lyrics, “Here comes the rain again / Falling on my head like a memory”.
Next up is the second verse, which repeats the first three lines of the first verse before adding a new couplet:
Summer has come and passed
Second verse to “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day.
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when September ends
Ring out the bells again
Like we did when spring began
Wake me up when September ends
The line about the ringing of bells makes further reference to the theme of innocence lost that is central to this song. Armstrong is perhaps singing about school bells ringing, which signifies children returning to school after their often-blissful summertime.
He follows this up by comparing it to the same thing happening in the beginning of spring, which is generally when schools have their spring breaks, and the students are let out for a week of vacation.
These references contribute to the overarching message that innocence should be cherished, because it never lasts as long as you’d like.
After this we have another chorus, followed by a guitar solo before moving into the third and final verse, which is almost exactly the same as the first verse, with one small but important alteration:
Summer has come and passed
Third verse to “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day.
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when September ends
Like my father’s come to pass
Twenty years has gone so fast
Wake me up when September ends
Wake me up when September ends
Wake me up when September ends
The difference here is that instead of seven years, Armstrong now sings about how twenty years has passed. Here he is referencing the time when he wrote “Wake Me Up When September Ends”, which was about twenty years after the passing of his father.
“Wake Me Up When September Ends” has a cinemetic music video that has been viewed as controversial over the years, with critics stating that the band was capitalizing on images of war and destruction.
The video depicts a couple that has their lives torn apart by the Iraq War, and thus the band drew heat for exploiting the issue of the war for financial gain.
Mike Dirnt had something to say about this during a 2005 interview with Rolling Stone:
Rock & roll should be dangerous. When it’s not, that’s when it’s mundane – you can see right through it, you want to change the channel. It should be striking and stir questions, and I think that that video, at the end of the day, comes down to that core emotion of loss. It’s something we’ve all experienced, and the further and further we get into this war, more people every day are experiencing that toss.
Mike Dirnt on the “Wake Me Up When September Ends” video.
The video begins with a couple (Jamie Bell and Evan Rachel Wood) expressing their love and devotion to one another in a heartbreaking encounter before Bell enlists in the Marine Corps and ships off to Iraq. The video continues to show scenes of Bell being ambushed in the war, and cuts to scenes of Wood mourning his loss.
For a video that caught flack for exploiting the war, I would say that there is a pretty strong anti-war undercurrent running through the whole thing. In fact, director Samuel Bayer even said that he wanted the video to be a countereffort to the television commercials that were being used to recruit soldiers at the time, calling it an advertisement for the “free thought of peace.”
Watch the video for “Wake Me Up When September Ends” by Green Day below.