Lord knows there’s been plenty of Green Day coverage already, but here’s one to add to Keith’s hitherto round-up of the band’s borrowed tunes. In fact, the song “Hold On” appears on what is quite possibly Green Day’s finest moment as a band, the juncture when they were on the brink of becoming their modern-day caricature, but still clearly feeling a charming sort of restlessness. The album Warning, which appeared in 2000, broke somewhat free of the pop-punk trappings that had emerged on ‘90s rock radio in the wake of 1994’s Dookie, and found the band adapting their usual schtick to an array of styles including acoustic-based ‘60s rock. In retrospect, it’s a shame that the album sold so poorly — such a thing may have been what diverted Green Day’s trajectory away from exploring such sounds more fully, and towards the contrived, pseudo-political arena rock preening that has defined the band since the lucrative American Idiot follow-up. Too bad they didn’t take their own Warning.

Returning to the particular song in question, “Hold On” borrows inarguably from the harmonica riff on the Beatles’ “I Should Have Known Better”. It certainly isn’t the most original thing they ever did, nor is it even remotely the best song on the album. It does, however, illustrate where the band members’ heads were during this point, since this one almost had to be intentional: