Green Day’s American Idiot is one of the most classic punk albums of all time. Interestingly, though, we all owe the success of that 2004 record to the failure of a previous, long-lost project: Cigarettes and Valentines.
The story goes… after Green Day’s Warning (2000), the band spent about half a year writing and recording a new record. That record would become Cigarettes and Valentines; between 16-20 tracks of “quick-tempoed punk” music, as described in the book Nobody Likes You: Inside the Turbulent Life, Times, and Music of Green Day by Mark Spitz.
Green Day’s long-lost ‘Cigarettes and Valentines’ album was allegedly stolen
The songs were, reportedly, closer to what Green Day did on their Dookie (1994) and Insomniac (1995) albums. As opposed to the more rock styling on Nimrod (1997)
and Warning.
As Spitz explained, Green Day bassist Mike Dirnt said they tried writing some more rock-oriented tunes and were ready to get back to punk. “We’ve had a nice break from making hard and fast music,” he said, “and it’s made us want to do it again.”
The known confirmed tracks for Cigarettes and Valentines were:
- “Cigarettes and Valentines”
- “Too Much Too Soon”
- “Dropout”
- “Sleepyhead”
- “Walk Away”
- “Shoplifter”
- “Governator”
- “Lights Out”
Only the title track has ever really had an official release. Punk News reported that they first played “Cigarettes and Valentines” live back in 2010. After that, it was the Awesome as F*** (2011) live album.
In 2003, the Cigarettes and Valentines recordings were allegedly stolen. An old report from Houston Press cited speculation that the album was simply scrapped in favor of American Idiot. However, there’s no evidence of this.
Rather than re-record the Cigarettes and Valentines tracks, Green Day opted to shift gears. “Those are really good songs, but we got these over here,” Dirnt said, “and we kinda felt like, ‘Should we put out these, and wait three or four years to put out these other songs and chase this thing that we kind of got going on over here?’”
Ultimately, that’s what they did. The band prioritized going in the direction that led to American Idiot, the title track of which Green Day performed ahead of Super Bowl LX.
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