Since the American Idiot cat has been released from the Green Day: Rock Band bag, I am now at liberty to discuss the heavy-duty hands-on time I had with the album while visiting Harmonix last Thursday.

How heavy-duty? Well, we spent eighteen minutes and twenty-six seconds playing just two songs: “Jesus of Suburbia” and “Homecoming,” the album’s two most epic tracks. We also hit up some of the other tracks, but I’ll get to those in a moment.

So how was it? Fun. As. Hell. Let’s break it down by instrument.

GUITAR
It’s easy to underestimate the guitar parts in any Green Day song. Yes, they’re a pop-punk band; and yes, that means the guitar is certainly simpler than, say, Dragonforce. But because the music is so chord-focused (as opposed to twiddly solos), the game is more about nailing chord changes and timing than about nailing intricate runs. For some people, three-button chords are the bane of their existence, and Green Day positively packs them in. But just as challenging are the syncopated sections like in “Holiday,” where you need to hit these very quick transitional notes while switching from one big chord to another, all the way through the song. And let’s also not overlook the fact that many of Green Day’s songs are fast. Even alt-strumming through the whole track — an absolute necessity in this game — you’ll need to build up stamina for the sheer number of notes streaming at you.

BASS
Overall, I found this a little less challenging than guitar, but only a little. The speed and rhythmic challenge match the guitar, but you of course don’t need to deal with the big fat chords. What you do have to deal with are a lot of subtle, quick fills that I had never really noticed before in American Idiot. (Listening to the album now, it occurs to me that the bass is oddly quiet in the mix; the game allows the bass to be a lot more prominent, and makes it easier to appreciate Mike Dirnt’s busy playing.) In fact, there are parts on bass that are more like playing solos than many of the guitar parts. You may chug along on a two or three different notes through three quarters of a verse, but then have to take on a fast, complex run all the way up and down the neck in the last line.

VOCALS
I probably spent more time singing than on any other instrument, in part because I know most of these songs well enough that I could watch the other sections while singing along, and sort of experience the game as a whole. And in part because the songs are just damned fun to sing — at least for me, since my vocal range is pretty similar to Billie Joe Armstrong’s. But here’s the thing that made the experience a total blast: harmonies.

Now, we had harmonies in The Beatles: Rock Band, but those tended to be very scripted and intricate. The harmony sections in Green Day are definitely simpler — often just two-part — but as a result are more fun than work. My favorite harmony section came in “Holiday,” I think, mainly because there’s a lot of shouting from the backing vocals. It was profoundly cool to sing “Can I get another Amen?” and have two other singers shout back “A! Men!”

Other fun parts: In the middle spoken section, the backing vocals shout along with the last word of each line; it makes for a very entertaining party atmosphere to have two of the three vocalists encouraged to holler. And the backing lines are so different from the lead line through most of the song that it feels like everyone has a unique part to play. This is a quality that’s particularly emphasized in “Homecoming,” in which each vocalist sings lead on a different part of the song — echoing the real song, in which Dirnt sings the “Nobody Likes You” part and drummer Tré Cool sings the “Rock and Roll Girlfriend” section.

Of course, the more traditional harmony sections are lovely as well; the “I Don’t Care” section of “Jesus of Suburbia” was particularly memorable, as were the lovely falsetto “oooh’s” immediately following, in “Dearly Beloved.” The song closes out with a nice example of both of the things I’ve been talking about here, in fact: The final “home” of “Tales of Another Broken Home” is sustained by the two backing parts, while the lead repeats “You’re leaving” over the top. It’s quite an exhilarating finish.

I realize I’m writing an awful lot about the vocals, but I wanted to mention one more thing: I was astonished by how little sanitizing the lyrics suffered. Sure, the big no-no words are muted out, but the frequent references to topics religious, sexual, and pharmaceutical seem to have made it into the game pretty well intact. I remember being particularly surprised that mentions of “Mary Jane” and cocaine in “Jesus of Suburbia” were untouched, as was “Am I retarded or am I just overjoyed?”

DRUMS
This is the thing that I think is going to surprise the hell out of people: Green Day’s drum sections are hard. And by “hard” I don’t just mean “fast,” though there’s certainly plenty of that. American Idiot is such a varied album, with lots of internally varied songs, that drumming requires a hell of a lot more than just speed and stamina. I ended up playing drums through all nine-and-a-half minutes of “Homecoming” — far from the album’s most challenging song — and ended up even more sweaty and sore than when we played Insomniac‘s “Brain Stew/Jaded,” the second half of which is famously fast. (For the record, I failed out twice…on Hard, which is normally a cakewalk for me on drums.)

If you’ve listened to a lot of early Green Day, you may not have a particularly high opinion of Tré Cool; his early playing was pretty standard pop-punk fare. But his playing has improved and evolved such that he’s using the drums as a legitimate instrument, not just a method of keeping time. And yet of course we’re not talking about Neil Peart here; the playing is still straightforward enough to be accessible. So I think those of us who waver between Hard and Expert drumming will find this particularly satisfying. When I played drums, I played on Hard so as not to embarrass myself, and found it seriously entertaining. But I also got the distinct sense that moving up to Expert, while challenging, would be certainly within my ability.

So there you have it: hands-on (and mouth-on, and feet-on) experience with what I would contend is Green Day’s most important album. Got any questions? Leave them in comments, and I’ll do my best to answer.

EDIT: Hey, here’s a playlist of tunes mentioned in this post, in case you’re not familiar with them.