Cigarettes and Valentines
Unreleased Green Day album that led to American Idiot.
Cigarettes and Valentines is an unreleased album by the American rock band Green Day, intended as the follow-up to Warning (2000). The album was nearly completed in 2003 when the master tapes were allegedly stolen from the band's studio, leading the group to abandon the project and instead create American Idiot (2004). Only the title track has been released in full form.
Quick Facts
- Artist
- Green Day
- Released
- Unreleased
- Recorded
- July–October 2002
- Studio
- Studio 880
- Oakland
- California
- Genre
- Punk rock
- Label
- Reprise
- Producer
- Rob Cavallo; Green Day
Facts from the source article.
Track listing
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cigarettes and Valentines | 2:43 |
| 2 | Too Much Too Soon | 3:30 |
| 3 | Dropout | 4:41 |
| 4 | Sleepyhead | |
| 5 | Walk Away | 3:27 |
| 6 | Shoplifter | 1:50 |
| 7 | Governator | 2:31 |
| 8 | Lights Out | 2:17 |
| 9 | Cluster Bomb | 2:48 |
| 10 | Homecoming (Nobody Likes You) | 10:19 |
| 11 | Everyone’s Breaking Down | 3:51 |
| 12 | Just Another Year | 1:55 |
Track listing from the source article.
History
Billie Joe Armstrong described the album's material as "good stuff." Musically, the songs were hard, quick-tempoed punk in the vein of Kerplunk (1991) and Insomniac (1995), contrasting with the band's previous two albums, Nimrod (1997) and Warning (2000), which had explored rock and folk punk. Bassist Mike Dirnt said the band had taken a break from making hard and fast music and wanted to return to that sound. When the album was nearly complete in 2003, the master tapes were allegedly stolen from the studio.
Green Day later called the alleged theft a "blessing in disguise," believing the album was not "maximum Green Day." Dirnt stated that backups were made but "it just wasn't the same as the originals." The band decided against re-recording and started from scratch, leading to American Idiot. Dirnt also said that after turning the album in, they had two or three additional songs they really liked, and decided to make a new album with those songs instead of releasing Cigarettes and Valentines.
Some songs were later re-recorded or reworked, but the original versions have never been officially released. The Network's album Money Money 2020 was speculated by some fans to be a re-recording or to contain aspects of the album, but Armstrong denied any connection.
Title song
The title song was first played live in Greenwood Village, Colorado, on August 28, 2010, during the 21st Century Breakdown World Tour. A live recording was released on the Awesome as Fuck (2011) live album. A lyric video appeared on Green Day's official YouTube channel on February 14, 2011, followed by a music video four days later. A live promo single was released on February 21, 2011, containing 2:43 of a performance in Phoenix, Arizona, with crowd shots from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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