People, people, people. That’s an entirely live performance above. Seriously.
This is easily one of my favorite pop songs ever; something that’s just so messy and ambitious, so funny (The “Cello Cello Cello” bit, with the word being sung because, in the original recorded version, they couldn’t afford to have real cellos on there, so they just sang the parts themselves) and so amazingly human. Even if I wasn’t won over by the entire thing by the time the song gets to its final movement – And it’s a song that tries to tell a story about a woman missing her lover, who’s been gone longer than she expected and is late in returning, in movements, little excerpts with different moods and points-of-view and, come on, that’s just great, right? – it ends with “You are forgiven” over and over again, which seems… I don’t know, astonishingly, beautifully kind, I guess (Not that anyone in the song doesn’t “deserve” forgiveness; it’s the choral nature of the way the line is delivered, repeated, as if there’s such forgiveness in the world for everyone, the word and the act as a magic spell for the listener).
Here’s the original recorded version:
And, just for fun, here’s a Green Day version that seems to want to do everything just a little bit faster than the original. But they do the “cello cello cello” part that I didn’t think they would…:
You are forgiven.