Green Day releases greatest hits album spanning 30 years

NEW YORK – Green Day released a massive greatest hits album on Friday, but the trio isn’t saying “Good Riddance” anytime soon.

The Grammy Award-winning band and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees released “Greatest Hits: God’s Favorite Band,” an album that spans about 30 years.

Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong said he thinks it’s the perfect soundtrack for our “age of outrage,” and rather than a farewell album, is “sort of like a book of short stories.”

“I don’t think there’s really any sadness,” Armstrong said by phone from Bogota, Colombia. “I think it’s more a little bit of nostalgia and reflecting on what we’ve done in the past and delivering to our fans.”

Armstrong and the band, which also includes drummer Tre Cool and bassist Mike Dirnt, said the timing just felt right this year for the compilation.

“The great thing is we’re young enough that we have another lifetime in front of us. That’s the part that I’m excited about,” said Armstrong, who was 16 when the band was started in 1986.

The new 22-track collection includes such hits as “When I Come Around,” “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” “American Idiot,” “21 Guns,” “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” “She” and “Wake Me Up When September Ends.”

It also includes a new song called “Back in the USA,” which has the lyric “I woke up to a bitter storm.” Armstrong said it was written after Green Day returned to the U.S. from a European tour following Donald Trump’s presidential election.

“I felt we’d come back to a different America that I was trying to recognize,” he said.

The group also added a reworked version of “Ordinary World,” which includes a duet with country singer Miranda Lambert. It was recorded in about an hour in a small studio in Denver when both Green Day and Lambert’s tours ended up in the same city, said Armstrong.

Armstrong and Lambert had already performed at the Grammys and he said, “She just nailed it.”

Green Day previously put out a greatest hits album in 2001, but that was before the trio’s groundbreaking album, “American Idiot,” was released.

The group is known for its raw, pop-punk approach, and is finding a new audience in 2017 through such protest songs as “American Idiot,” which was written about former Republican President George W. Bush,

“We always live in chaos and once you think you start to have it figured out, it changes immediately,” he said. “That’s just the way our culture is. Right now, we’re in the age of outrage and revenge.”