“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is a song by American rock band Green Day. The power ballad is the fourth track from their seventh studio album American Idiot (2004). Reprise Records released “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” as the second single from American Idiot in November 2004. The song’s lyrics were written by lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong, and the music was composed by the band. Production was handled by Rob Cavallo and Green Day.
The song speaks from the point of view of American Idiot‘s main character, “Jesus of Suburbia”, and is a moderate mid-tempo song characterised by sombre and bleak lyrics. This is in contrast to the previous track on the album, “Holiday”, which illustrates Jesus of Suburbia’s high of being in The City. MTV’s Green Day Makes a Video described “Holiday” as a party, and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” as the subsequent hangover.
The song was ranked number one on Rolling Stone‘s Reader’s Choice: Singles of the Decade list in 2009 and number 65 on the 100 Best Songs of the Decade list in the same year. It has sold over 2 million copies in the United States as of 2010. The single peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, making it Green Day’s most successful song in the United States. The song was the ninth-highest-selling single of the 2000–2009 decade with worldwide sales exceeding 5 million copies.As of 2021, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” is the only song to win both the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and MTV Video Music Award for Video of the Year. It remains one of Green Day’s signature songs.
Outside the United States, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” charted strongly on many international charts. The song debuted and peaked at number five on the UK Singles Chart on the chart dated December 5, 2004, giving the band their third top 10 single in that country. It stayed in the UK top 100 for 29 weeks, becoming their longest-charting single at the time, but “Wake Me Up When September Ends” would log 32 weeks in the UK top 100 nearly a year later; it remains their second-longest stay on the UK chart. In 2021, the British Phonographic Industry awarded the song a Platinum certification for sales and streams exceeding 600,000 units.
The award-winning music video for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” was directed by Samuel Bayer. The music videos for “Holiday” and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” were filmed with a single, continuous storyline—the video for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” picks up where “Holiday” has left off, with the last few seconds of “Holiday” audible at the start of the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” video. he video depicts the band members after their car has stalled in the desert, and they begin a melancholy walk down a dusty road. Scenes are interspersed with film footage, taken from around Los Angeles, of homeless people and other miserable sights. The video also features performance footage of the band playing the song in an abandoned warehouse.
