Billie Joe Armstrong thought he’d written the greatest song ever. Then the drugs wore off.

On a recent episode of the podcast Song Exploder, Armstrong admitted drugs played a role in the original demo of the band’s landmark 1994 hit “Basket Case.”

Billie Joe Armstrong Envisioned “Basket Case” as a Love Story

“Basket Case” catapulted pop-punk onto the mainstream map and Green Day to unprecedented fame with the trio’s much-celebrated 1994 album Dookie. Since then, countless fans have wondered aloud, at the top of their lungs, “Am I paranoid or am I just stoned?”

As it turns out, however, the final product couldn’t be further from Armstrong’s original vision. Armstrong was 22 years old, living in the basement of a ramshackle student house in Berkeley, California. He had recently bought a new 4-track recorder and a guitar amp, and he was itching to pen a ballad.

“I had this melody in my head for a while, and I wanted to have this sort of grand song about a love story,” Armstrong said.

What is arguably Green Day’s most recognizable song almost never happened. Armstrong was so ashamed of his work on “Basket Case

” that he shelved the song indefinitely.

Fortunately for generations of pop-punk enthusiasts, Armstrong decided to approach the song from a fresh angle. By this time, Dookie was taking shape as a meditation on “everyday life and feelings and emotions you go through that people can identify with,” the frontman said.

“And so I think I just got the courage to get into it again, trying to write the lyrics,” Armstrong said. “And it was the best decision I’ve ever made, probably, as a songwriter.”