This song is about anxiety attacks and a feeling that you are going crazy. Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong suffered from various panic disorders while he was growing up – he would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with a panic attack and walk around his neighborhood to settle down. “Basket Case” was a cathartic and personal song for him. “The only way I knew how to deal with it was to write a song about it,” he explained.
“Basket Case” was the second single released from Dookie, following “Longview”. It peaked at number one on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart, a position it maintained for five weeks. In 1995, the song garnered a Grammy Award nomination in the Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group category.
Do you have the time to listen to me whine
About nothing and everything all at once?
I am one of those
Melodramatic fools
Neurotic to the bone
No doubt about it
Sometimes I give myself the creeps
Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me
It all keeps adding up
I think I’m cracking up
Am I just paranoid?
Or am I just stoned?
I went to a shrink
To analyze my dreams
She says it’s lack of sex that’s bringing me down
I went to a whore
He said my life’s a bore
So quit my whining ’cause it’s bringing her down
Sometimes I give myself the creeps
Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me
It all keeps adding up
I think I’m cracking up
Am I just paranoid?
Huh yeah, yeah, yeah
(Ooh, ooh)
Grasping to control
So I better hold on
Sometimes I give myself the creeps
Sometimes my mind plays tricks on me
It all keeps adding up
I think I’m cracking up
Am I just paranoid?
Or am I just stoned?
Writer/s: Billie Joe Armstrong,
source
History of Sorts 
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