Green Day Song Honors Amy Winehouse

Think of the artists anybody would expect to write a song honoring the late Amy Winehouse a year removed from her death at 27 from alcohol poisoning.

How far down the list did anybody get down to "Green Day?"

Almost every time, truth proves stranger than fiction: among their 38-song, three-album ¡Uno! ¡Dos! ¡Tre! set, the veterans of more than two decades of punk took a moment to honor the late British songstress whose love of piercings and tattoos clashed so fascinatingly with a deep love of early soul and '60s girl-group sensibilities.

Then again, it's about as "punk" as it gets to rock a beehive with ink, but have the real statement be vocal gifts that, at her best, could've almost been on par with U.K. peers like Adele and Lily Allen. That dichotomy said as much about the real depth of Winehouse's persona as any single note she ever sang.

As it turned out, lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong told NME, a word about the loss of Winehouse happened to fit like a hand into the glove with the landscape of the middle-chapter ¡Dos!. 

"I didn't know her, I just thought it was a real tragic loss. It's interesting because if you think about ¡Dos!, it's a party record, and so at the end of it 'Amy' kind of comes across as the consequences of the party," Armstrong explained. To Armstrong, when the music world lost Winehouse last summer, it lost much more than just another singer who couldn't stand up to her demons. It lost a tether to a generation of influential, pure soul that the tides of time carries a generation further and further away from out to sea.

"[Her death] happened last summer, around this time I believe, and I just thought her music and her taste in music was so connected to old soul music and the original Motown and Otis Redding and Sam Cooke and things like," Armstrong said. "And I think that was a major loss because that was a generation's connection to that, and this was someone who should be here now and I just felt really sad. 'Oh my God, this huge musical figure that just got lost' and, you know, that sucks."

¡Uno! goes on sale Sept. 24, ¡Dos! comes out Nov. 12 and finally, ¡Tre! drops Jan. 14, 2013.