This Green Day Song Inspired ‘What’s My Age Again?’

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Blink 182’s Mark Hoppus has revealed that the iconic opening riff to ‘What’s My Age Again’, came from messing around while trying to play one of his favourite songs.

On the ‘Chris Demakes A Podcast’, where Less than Jakes’ Chris DeMake interviews bands about their songs, Mark deconstructed ‘What’s My Age Again?’.

Mark said “I’ll tell you where the origin of the song was. There’s a Green Day song called ‘J.A.R’ that’s on the Angus soundtrack. It starts off with this bass intro that’s really rad. I was messing around on a guitar trying to learn that and kind of messed the progression and played it incorrectly and thought, ‘Oh that sounds kind of cool’. That was the basis for the opening riff of the song.”

So from Mark trying to play this:

He wrote this:

After revealing this Mark then went on to tell a embarassing story about the time he confessed his lobe og J.A.R to Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, on the opening night of the band’s 2002 Pop Disaster Tour.

“That song is so good; I think it’s your best song,” he enthused to Billie.

Billie Joe responded by saying “Oh, that’s cool. [Bassist] Mike Dirnt wrote that one; it’s the only one of our songs that he wrote.”

Check out the podcast here: