10 Greatest Albums That Never Happened
6. Green Day: Cigarettes & Valentines
By the late '90s, Green Day were starting to feel like a band past their best years. They'd failed to capture the same kind of excitement, generated by Dookie (1994), with a string of moderately successful followup albums. The grumblings as to whether Green Day were still a relevant group, came to a head when they released Warning in 2000. The general concusses was that they had lost their way.
Eager to turn things around, the band started undertaking group therapy, and strove for more collaborative efforts in the writing room. The result was the now infamous lost record, Cigarettes & Valentines. Not long before the record was set for release, the band revealed that all the master recordings had been stolen from the studio - a claim disputed by the studio owner.
The loss of the Cigarettes & Valentines masters, happened to coincide with the release of Money Money 2020, the debut record from The Network - a Green Day Side Project. This led many to speculate that the lost masters were in fact used on this record - a claim denied by Billy Joe Armstrong.
Whatever the truth, the group decided to start from scratch. Green Day took to the studio with a renewed motivation. The resulting record salvaged their career and hurtled them into new found heights of stardom. Enter, eyeliner, and checkerboard ties.