Songfacts®:

• Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong has battled alcohol addiction throughout his career. He has been open about his struggles and has spoken about how his dependency has affected his personal life and his music. In 2012 a drunk Armstrong went into meltdown onstage at the iHeartRadio Festival and checked into rehab two days later.
  
  In this ballad, Armstrong sings about the dilemma he constantly faces between wanting to stay sober and the desire to give in to his addiction. He talks about the guilt and shame that he feels, and the fear of falling back into old habits.
  
  "'Dilemma' was one of those songs that was kind of easy to write because it was so personal to me," Armstrong explained. "We've seen so many of our peers struggle with addiction and mental illness. This song is all about the pain that comes from those experiences."
• This song is all about the pain that comes from Armstrong's experiences.
  
  Welcome to my problems
  It's not an invitation
  This is my dilemma
  And it's my obsession
  
  Armstrong told Kerrang how the opening lines sound like a Facebook post. "It's like, 'Come feel sorry for me, come feel my pain,' he said. "But, you know, I don't have Facebook or Twitter, so I just do it in songs to where I think with melody it becomes more relatable, and people can interpret it in the different ways they want. It could be me just joking, but it could be dead f---ing serious, too."
• Green Day released "Dilemma" as the third single from their 14th studio album, Saviors. The record is the latest collaboration between band and producer Rob Cavallo, whose previous work with Green Day includes their iconic longplayers Dookie (1994) and American Idiot (2004).
• The song's black-and-white music video starts with Armstrong passed out on the ground while slurring the brutally honest lyrics. The visual then takes viewers on a journey with the band through a classic night of intense performances and even wilder partying. As the track approaches its end, the memories gain some color, revealing the cold, sober truth to the Green Day frontman: that Drunk Billie made a mess of everything.
• Ryan Baxley directed the music video. Baxley also co-directed the videos for the first two singles from Saviors, "The American Dream Is Killing Me" and "Look Ma, No Brains."
• Bassist Mike Dirnt is a big fan of the song because he feels many can relate to its raw honesty. "Whether you're struggling with drugs, alcohol, or love. It says, 'I was sober, but I'm drunk again. I'm in trouble and in love again,'" he explained to Rolling Stone. "It's like we all have our addictions, and recognizing them and putting them on paper for the whole world to poke at, it's a scary thing. But it's important that people do it, because once you find out you're not alone, you're on a path to somewhere better."
• After being sober for several years, Armstrong started to worry that he was missing out by not drinking. "I wrote a little of that song dealing with that hangover, and the struggle of once I start, I can't stop," he told UK newspaper The Sun. "I saw my doctor and saw bloodwork come back that said, 'You're not as healthy as you should be. Your liver is not being good to you.' I was like, 'All right, that's enough for me,' so I didn't do any kind of program, I just stopped."