Green Day Team With MySpace Music for "Secret" NY Show

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Four days after next Friday's release of 21st Century Breakdown, Green Day will host a free concert in New York City for 300 of their fans. MySpace Music has confirmed the band is scheduled to take over Manhattan's Webster Hall on May 19th, and fans will soon get their chance to win tickets to this secret gig by responding to a series of MySpace "The List" blogs and bulletins. For those who can't make the show, MySpace Music will be broadcasting the entire concert. A number of tickets will also be going on sale Saturday. Rolling Stone's four-and-a-half-star review of the album is featured in our new issue, and available online now.

(Check out photos from Green Day's most recent Breakdown gig.)

Secret shows are nothing new for the band, who, back in 2004, did a series of small gigs — including one at New York's Irving Plaza that doubled as an album release party — where they performed mostly material from American Idiot, their first punk opera, which was at the time a huge artistic leap.

It's unclear at this stage whether Green Day will be playing material from their upcoming album only, or whether they'll be dusting off some of their earlier hits for the set list, as the band did last month in their hometown of Oakland, California. Rolling Stone's David Fricke was there for the third in what was a series of gigs where they debuted 21st Century Breakdown songs live, the last of which was held at the opulent Fox Theater. That show was preceded by two club gigs which, by all accounts, were raw and intimate.

The band's new album is another rock opera, divided into three acts: "Heroes and Cons," "Charlatans and Saints" and "Horseshoes and Handgrenades." "American Idiot marked a really high bar for us," frontman Billie Joe Armstrong recently told RS. "It's easy to go, 'OK, we can just write a collection of songs.' But there was something about trying to keep going for it."

Related Stories:

• Green Day's Build Up to the Breakdown: Photos
• Green Day's Hometown Throwdown: 21st Century Breakdown Onstage

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Song Stories

“He Will Break Your Heart”

Jerry Butler | 1960

A lightly swinging Latin-influenced, almost cha-cha groove and close harmonies decorated Jerry Butler's early soul hit "He Will Break Your Heart," delivering a stately warning that his rival would never love his girl like he did. The melody came to Butler as he was driving on the highway from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Philadelphia with Curtis Mayfield, and as Butler told Rolling Stone, "I just sang the melody and Curtis put the chords to it." The song's premise, Butler added, "was something that I'd lived ...The lyric was an experience rather than a revelation. Whereas music is usually a revelation."

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