Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)

Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong wrote this song when his girlfriend moved to Ecuador to live with her family and continue her schooling. He tried to be levelheaded about it, but to show his anger, he named the song "Good Riddance" and made "Time Of Your Life" the subtitle. "It's about trying to be cool, accepting that, in life, people go in different directions," Armstrong told Rolling Stone. "People come into your life and it's wonderful, but they seem to go out of your life as quickly as they came in."

This was written as an acoustic song to distinguish it from the heavily produced rock music that was popular in the '90s. Armstrong recalled to Spin Magazine in a 2010 interview: "That was really the first time we attempted a ballad. The first time we ever played that song was during an encore in New Jersey - I had to pound a beer backstage to get up the courage. I knew we were gonna take a tomato to the face." The song was such a sonic departure for the band that record stores reported a high rate of returns from customers who purchased the Nimrod album expecting similar songs.

Billie Joe Armstrong wrote this song in 1993 and submitted it for the band's first major-label album, Dookie, which was released in 1994. Both the band and their label felt it was a great song but didn't fit on the album, which was loaded with punk blasters. The song was held back and didn't make their next album, Insomniac (1995) either. It was finally included on the Nimrod album in 1997.