Green Day Talk ‘Lost’ Album ‘Cigarettes and Valentines’

The members of Green Day have revealed the fate of the songs that were once earmarked for release on a 2003 album they'd planned to put out as Cigarettes and Valentines — until the recordings were stolen and presumed lost forever.

NME brought up the subject during a recent video interview with the group, pointing out that the record's rough mixes were eventually recovered — and the title track made it into the set list for their 2011 live album, Awesome as F---. But that doesn't necessarily mean the rest of the album will ever see release.

"It’s pretty much in the vault right now," shrugged frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. "There was the one song, ‘Cigarettes and Valentines,’ that we brought out live. I don’t know, we’ll see if any of that stuff ends up seeing the light of day."

"There’s always a lot in the vault," added bassist Mike Dirnt, "but we tend to look forward rather than reaching back."

That's a strategy that's paid off pretty well for Green Day — as the NME's report notes, the loss of the Cigarettes and Valentines recordings was what ultimately forced them into the corner that produced their massive critical and commercial hit American Idiot — but that doesn't mean the band is utterly unwilling to revisit its past when they enter the studio. In fact, as Armstrong pointed out, they leafed through a few of their back pages while putting together the track listing for their latest release, Revolution Radio.

"There’s one song that was written a long time ago that’s on the new record called ‘Young Blood,'" said Armstrong. "That got a facelift and new lyrics and stuff like that."

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