10 Perfect Rock Songs Cut From Classic Albums
6. Cigarettes And Valentines - Green Day
If you look at Green Day’s chronology, 2003 should have been when they were plotting their comeback. Their last album Warning didn’t really set the world on fire, and the band figured they would dig down in their souls to bring out something that was a lot more in line with what they were making in their glory days of Dookie. That’s definitely what we got on American Idiot, but we could have had a completely different album taking its place.
After recording what amounted to a whole album’s worth of songs, the band returned to the studio to mix the tracks to find all of the masters stolen. The mystery album, tentatively titled Cigarettes and Valentines, may have slipped through their fingers, but it caused the band to take a look at what they wanted to say with this new record, leading Billie Joe Armstrong to write songs like American Idiot. Some of the good stuff never leaves you, and when the band got out on tour to promote 21st Century Breakdown, they added the title track of their unreleased album into the setlist. If this one song is any indication of what the band would have been doing though, it’s a shame that we don’t have the original version of what they wanted to release.
Performed at breakneck speed, this is the kind of angry Green Day that most of us hadn’t seen since at least Insomniac, looking to just dwell in the seedy underbelly of the punk underground and tapping into something a lot more gnarly than what the likes of Blink-182 were putting out at the time. The band have said multiple times that we’ll probably never hear that original version of Cigarettes and Valentines, but this is the kind of punk rock debauchery that would have made Mike Ness proud.