Billie Joe reveals 'real' and 'stagnant' are antonyms

Poor old Green Day - having wrought a world in which every band is a bit like them (by making being a bit like Blink 182 seem, sort of, cool), they're now struggling to find isnpiration for their next record:

“We have a lot of music – something like 45 songs. It’s total chaos, I want to dig into who I am and what I’m feeling at this moment – which is middle aged.

“We’ve been doing this for 20 years now. You want to make sure you’re being honest with yourself. I also have to ask myself ‘what’s real out there?’ Right now, it seems stagnant.”

We're not sure that stagnancy and unreality are the same thing, and we're a little lost as to why a stagnant music scene would suddenly make recording music difficult - isn't it better to have something to react against.

How, we wonder, does Armstrong check that the songs he's writing are being honest with him? Does he hire a detective to go through their bins, checking for unexplained restaurant receipts or discarded gifts? Or does he use a lie detector test of some sort?