Basket Case

The version of "Basket Case" that ended up on Green Day's album Dookie was recorded between September and October 1993 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California, with producer Rob Cavallo. Cavallo had first encountered the band through their demo tape, which included the song, and he signed them to Reprise Records in mid-1993. Before that, Billie Joe Armstrong had written an early version of the track around 1992 or 1993, while living with his bandmates, using a four-track recorder. He originally wrote it as a love song, drafting the lyrics while on crystal meth. Once sober, he judged them embarrassingly bad and set the song aside. When he returned to it, he rewrote the words around his experiences with panic attacks, a change he later described as probably the best decision he had made as a songwriter. The band demoed the rewritten version at Andy Ernst's Art of Ears studio in San Francisco.

Reprise released "Basket Case" on August 1, 1994, as the second single from Dookie, following "Longview". It topped the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart for five weeks and earned a 1995 Grammy nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group.

The music video, directed by Mark Kohr, was filmed at Agnews Developmental Center, an abandoned mental institution in Santa Clara County, California, at the band's request. The members found old patient files, deep scratches in the walls and scattered dental molds during filming. Shot in monochrome with color added afterward, the video received nine MTV Video Music Award nominations in 1995 and won none of them.