Amanda

Billie Joe at Red7 in November, 2011: "You know you have those people, like you have a first love and all the sudden it's just like they're a 're-occurring dream.' A re-occurring dream that happens to you all the time. So, this re-occurring dream happened to me, starting with this song called 'She.' And then it kind of travelled its way into another song called ['Stuart and the Ave']. And then it travelled its way to American Idiot in a song called 'Whatsername,' but now, it's travelled out again, and I say 'Fuck it, I'm gonna name the girl. Fuck it, it's been fuckin'...19 years ago.' This song's called 'Amanda.'"

Billie Joe (Guitar World, 2012): "Yeah, she's in ['Amanda'], and all the way back to a song like 'Stuart and the Ave.' [from Insomniac]. She's an old friend who goes back to a long time ago. kind of like a recurring dream. She's shown up in different songs here and there that are bitter or bittersweet. I wrote the song 'Amanda' from a perspective of, 'Okay, now that we're grown-ups/' She's got her kids and her husband, and I've got my family. And it's just asking the question, 'How are you? What's life like for you? This is what I'm up to.' We had a chance to reconnect and talk a little bit. And that was that."

The song is about Billie Joe's 'first love,' a girl named Amanda whom he dated for about a year before Dookie. They both lived in the 'Ashby House' in Berkeley. She broke up with him when she moved to Ecuador to study, and has haunted him ever since. The narrator appears, in some places, to be reminding himself of what broke their relationship apart. Interestingly enough, he barely says anything negative about Amanda. He blames the demise of their relationship almost solely on himself, saying that he "wasn't strong enough" to be her man. Additionally, the narrator is curious about how Amanda is doing now, which again shows the way that she still occupies his mind from time to time.

Have your own interpretation of "Amanda"? Leave a comment below.