Green Day on the “bummer” of their pre-‘American Idiot’ album ‘Cigarettes & Valentines’ being stolen

nme.com:

Green Day have reflected on the “bummer” of their pre-‘American Idiot’ album ‘Cigarettes & Valentines’ being stolen more than 20 years ago, while also noting that it was a “blessing” in disguise.The unreleased record was written and recorded in 2003, but the master tapes were stolen when it was close to being finished.Instead of being the follow-up to 2000’s ‘Warning’, they released their seminal ‘American Idiot’ in 2004.“They were just gone,” said Tré Cool of the ‘Cigarettes And Valentines’ recordings in a new interview with Audacy, “so somebody probably stole them – maybe didn’t know what was on them”.“I’ve never heard that ever happening to anybody,” added frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. “It was a bummer, for sure.

We put a lot of work into it, but at the same time, it was a blessing. We were like, ‘Let’s just start from scratch. Let’s try this over again.’ Maybe it’s just a sign that maybe we made a crappy record and we should make a better one.”Asked whether anything from the lost record made it onto any later Green Day material, Armstrong added: “There was a lot of stuff that were full songs, from the original version of ‘Homecoming’, that was on American Idiot.

We ended up using a lot of those parts, and of connected it together, which makes this sort of crazy suite, as they call it, of a song.”The band spoke to NME back in 2016 about the lost ‘Cigarettes & Valentines’ .Explaining that mixes of the tracks were recovered and the title track was recorded and released for live album ‘Awesome As Fuck’.