Green Day released Greatest Hits: God's Favorite Band worldwide through Reprise Records on November 17, 2017. The 22-track compilation paired 20 catalog selections with two additions: “Back In The USA” and a new version of “Ordinary World” featuring Miranda Lambert. Those recordings gave the retrospective its own material beyond the songs listeners already knew.
“Back In The USA” arrived with a music video that cast the band as suburban fathers in a world initially presented in black and white. Special glasses revealed the ugliness beneath that orderly setting, including a zombie-like Donald Trump. Stereogum connected the clip to They Live and Pleasantville. The satire tied the new track to the politics of its release year, even as the compilation reached back into the band’s earliest records.
The collection opened with “2000 Light Years Away,” from 1991’s Kerplunk, before moving into the Dookie era. Five songs from Dookie and four from American Idiot occupied nine of its 22 slots, alongside later material including “21 Guns,” “Bang Bang” and “Still Breathing.” Green Day’s previous greatest-hits set, International Superhits!, had arrived in 2001, before American Idiot or 21st Century Breakdown. Ten tracks carried over to the 2017 compilation, which extended the selection through Revolution Radio before ending with the two additions.
A March 2017 appearance on The Late Show supplied the joke behind the title: a projection of God interrupted the introduction and declared Green Day his favorite band. The compilation carried that television gag into the record store, turning the name of a greatest-hits album into a punch line.
“Ordinary World” had a different route into the package. Billie Joe Armstrong starred in the 2016 film of the same name, and the song appeared on Revolution Radio that year. In a 2020 interview with Rolling Stone, he recalled trying to write something that captured his character’s life. “Outlaws,” another song that reached Revolution Radio, had been one unsuccessful attempt at that assignment. He eventually found the answer in the more country-oriented “Ordinary World,” a song he described as being about family and the value of simple connections.
Lambert and Armstrong already had a shared performance behind them. They had sung together at the 2014 Grammy Awards in a tribute to Phil Everly. For the compilation, their partnership moved onto a Green Day recording, with Lambert joining Armstrong on the acoustic song.
The session took place at Denver’s Side 3 Studios in August 2017. According to Westword’s reporting, both artists had played in the area on the same day and arranged to record the following day. Side 3 subsequently identified Studio A as the room they used. The meeting also created a practical problem for the studio: finding parking for three tour buses.
Armstrong later made a connection between the compilation’s opening song and its duet. In that 2020 interview, he described “Ordinary World” as an extension of “2000 Light Years Away,” linking the songs through his commitment to lasting relationships. “Roots matter to me, I guess,” he said. The compilation placed those two points in his songwriting on the same record.
