Now that the trilogy is out I thought I might reflect a little on this whole project. We learned of this whole thing back in April with a tweet from Billie Joe announcing they'd be releasing 3 albums over several months toward the end of 2012 and into early 2013. Most fans were elated, the idea that we would get so much new music from our favorite band is pretty damn exciting. There were naysayers, but I'm pretty sure that with every Green Day album since Dookie there have been people bitching about it.

I think many of us did feel this undercurrent of worry, however small, that this might be a mistake. The idea of any band releasing 37 songs across three albums separated by only a few weeks and the attention span of our internet-fried "give-me-everything-now" culture, lends itself to worry. It's different, most musicians don't do it, it could fail, and none of us want to see anything fail that Green Day does. At the same time, it was bold, different, and interesting.

We've always known Green Day writes a tremendous amount of music between albums. After American Idiot they had written some 60 songs, which eventually got whittled down into the 18 featured on 21st Century Breakdown. There are dozens, if not hundreds of songs that Billie Joe, Mike, and Tre have written that we'll never hear. So with a plan to release 3 albums it introduced the idea that finally we might get to hear more of that stuff that would otherwise be thrown out. Of course this is exciting for most of us, but some people saw it as an egocentric move by Green Day. "Do they really think that all the music they write is so good that none of it should be edited down?" Well...yeah.