Green Day is recording shows on its current tour for a live album, according to Punknews.org. At a gig in Denver last Saturday (August 28th), front man Billie Joe Armstrong announced that the concert was being recorded for a live release, then went on to introduce what he said was a new track.

The song, however, was "Cigarettes & Valentines," which was slated to be the title track of an album Green Day was recording back in 2003 as the follow-up to 2000's Warning. According to the band, they decided to abandon the record and then found out that the master tapes were stolen from the studio. Rather than re-record any of it, the group started from scratch and came up with their 2004 blockbuster, American Idiot.

Bassist Mike Dirnt said the trio already had American Idiot underway when the tapes of the other album disappeared: "We went to listen to the other stuff and they were on other hard drives, and they're just kind of MIA. We'd go in there and we were like, the doors are open all the time, not really locked or anything, and they're still unfound. And then we had a talk with ourselves and it was like, 'What do we do? Do we go back and re-record all those songs?' But we already, deep down, also knew that it was like, we'd beaten them."

The allegedly stolen tapes for Cigarettes & Valentines have never surfaced online or anywhere, leading some fans to speculate that Green Day were unhappy with the recordings themselves and used the "stolen tapes" story as a cover to just bury the record.

There's no word on whether any other "new" or previously unreleased tracks will appear on the live album, or when the set itself will appear.

Green Day has been touring behind 2009's 21st Century Breakdown and said earlier this year that they were already working on demos for their next studio effort.

Green Day wraps up its tour this week with shows in Chula Vista, California on Thursday (September 2nd) and San Francisco on Saturday (September 4th).