Wake Me Up When September Ends
by Green Day
- 103
- BPM
- G minor
- Key
- 6A
- Camelot
- 55
- Danceability
- 3
- Acousticness
In 2004 Green Day were making American Idiot, a concept album about a teenager called Jesus of Suburbia, and one song did not fit the story. "Wake Me Up When September Ends" came from Billie Joe Armstrong's own life. His father died in September 1982. On the day of the funeral, he ran home, locked himself in his room, and told his mother to wake him when September ended. He kept that title for years before he had a breakthrough and wrote the song. The band recorded it at Ocean Way Recording with producer Rob Cavallo.
Reprise released it as the album's fourth single on June 13, 2005. It reached number six on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one in the Czech Republic and Croatia. Samuel Bayer directed the video, in which a young couple, played by Jamie Bell and Evan Rachel Wood, are separated when the boyfriend joins the Marine Corps during the Iraq War.
Listeners have found other meanings in it, including a song about the victims and survivors of the September 11 attacks. A blogger's video pairing it with news coverage of Hurricane Katrina went viral. Each year its popularity spikes in the last days of September.
Wake Me Up When September Ends runs at 103 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.33 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 583 ms. It is in G minor, Camelot 6A, which shares its notes with Bb major and mixes cleanly with C minor and D minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.