Don't look for a "Time of Your Life, Part II" on Green Day's next album. Band leader Billie Joe Armstrong says he would be "kidding myself" in trying to repeat the atypical acoustic number that served as a sentimental soundtrack for everything from the "Seinfeld" finale to high school graduations to network news millennium montages--new territory for the Bay Area punk trio.
       "It would be kidding the world as well," says Armstrong, sitting with bassist Mike Dirnt at a Hollywood recording studio where they and drummer Tre Cool are mixing the band's next album, "Warning." Due Oct. 3, it will be the follow-up to 1997's "Nimrod," which contained the anomalous hit. The song generally known as "Time of Your Life," Armstrong notes, was actually titled "Good Riddance" and was anything but a sentimental send-off. And many of the people who embraced it, misinterpreting it as they did, are not really part of the band's main fan base.
       "The thing that happened with that song, that many people getting into it, that's just an accident," Armstrong says. "I'm not going to try to do that again."
       Actually, the song's vast exposure didn't even boost album sales significantly. At 1.6 million copies sold in the U.S. in SoundScan's figures, "Nimrod" is not dramatically more than the 1.2 million of 1995's "Insomniac"--both far behind "Dookie," the band's 1994 major-label debut, which sold 6.6 million copies on the wave of a new punk explosion and such attention-getting appearances as Woodstock '94.
       The band--which will headline the Warped Tour this summer (in the Southland for three days this week) before the album's release--did use the song's breakthrough into new sonic territories as a launching point for more stylistic exploration.
       "It probably freed us up to where we can just experiment more with different rhythms and styles and play a lot more acoustic guitar--not the way I play on that song, but more the hard, Pete Townshend playing," Armstrong says.
       Townshend and other British Invasion figures are clearly reference points in three songs they've finished mixing with industry veteran Jack Joseph Puig. "Sex, Blood and Booze" has strong echoes of the early Who in its guitar sound and garage-rock construction.
       "Minority," a broadside call to stand apart from the "moral majority," evokes the Kinks' Ray Davies in his "Village Green Preservation Society" period. And "Hold On," a personal affirmation of perseverance, is built around a guitar and harmonica bit that sounds patterned on the Beatles' "I Should Have Known Better."
       The musical and lyrical maturity is no accident, Armstrong and Dirnt say, with both of them now 28.
       "I'm not 19, and I'm glad I'm not 19," Armstrong, the father of two children, says. "Our last records had a theme of sort of a downer, talking about drugs or loneliness or hate, a lot of angry stuff."
       "There's more sense of hope to this record. For me it was important for this record to get up at 7 every day with my kids, take them to school, go home and work with the band and maybe enjoy standing out in front of a grocery store or something, just being me. I have a lot more lust for life than I had."