"When I Come Around" is a song by American rock band Green Day. It is the 10th track on their third studio album, Dookie (1994), and was shipped to radio in December 1994 before being physically released as the fourth single from that album in January 1995 by Reprise Records. It was played live as early as 1992. "When I Come Around" peaked at number six on the US Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart, topped the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart for seven weeks, and reached number two on the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart. Worldwide, it became a top-10 hit in Australia, Canada, Iceland, and New Zealand. Mark Kohr directed the song's music video. As of August 2010, "When I Come Around" has sold 639,000 copies. This makes it the band's second best-selling single of the 1990s, behind their 1997 hit "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)". In late 2023, for the 35th anniversary of Modern Rock Tracks (which by then had been renamed to Alternative Airplay), Billboard ranked the song as the 19th-most successful in the chart's history.

Composition

The song is played in 4/4 time and has a verse-chorus song structure. Most of the song is based around a sequence of four chords in the key of G flat major.

Critical reception

David Stubbs from Melody Maker felt the band is "threatening to get caught up in the tramlines of Rainbow's "Since You've Been Gone" in the opening chords [of the song]." Pan-European magazine Music & Media commented, "We asked Nick Lowe, one-time producer in the first wave of punk, what's the difference between then and now? He answered: 'Green Day can really play.' Life is sometimes so simple." A reviewer from Music Week gave "When I Come Around" three out of five, writing, "The fourth track to be lifted from their gold-selling Dookie album lacks the character and charm of 'Basket Case' but shouldn't harm their chart fortunes if their US success is anything to go by." Sylvia Patterson from NME viewed it as "their least frantic rouser to date [...] but nonetheless it's a mutant sun-ripe beef tomato of a pop guitar romp featuring the rhyming of "loser" with "user" and — heck! — "accuser" just like they were The Monkees."

Music video

The music video for the song is directed by Mark Kohr. It shows the band walking to different places, like the Mission District, Broadway, and the Powell Street Station in San Francisco and Berkeley, California at night, along with various scenes of people doing common things all inter-related. One of the first scenes of the video eventually leads back to the scene at the end. The band's touring guitarist Jason White can be seen in the video with his girlfriend. Before the video was filmed, MTV aired a live performance of the song by the band at the 1994 Woodstock Festival. MTV's Ultimate Albums: Dookie special credited the simple horizontally-striped sweater worn by Armstrong in the video for starting a fashion trend of similar sweaters.

Track listings

Initial pressing Australian single 7-inch picture disc

Charts and certifications

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

Certifications

Release history

Use in media

Citations

Sources