The songs Axl Rose said were the “most difficult” to write
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the work Axl Rose has to put in to make a Guns N’ Roses record.
Their debut may have been made with all the passion of a kickass rock and roll band, but if Chinese Democracy is any indication, it’s that the frontman will wait for years on end until he thinks a song is officially ready to be heard by the people. And while that record did result in one of the most overindulgent records of all time, it’s only because the singer wants to get everything exactly right.
And it’s not like it wasn’t that way in the beginning. The idea of the band being a bunch of punks that fumbled their way into making a classic record, Duff McKagan remembered the band practising for hours on end until they got tunes like ‘Paradise City’ and ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ exactly right. That isn’t a band without a plan for their future, and many of Rose’s biggest ambitions were going to depend on the second album.
Whereas most of their greatest influences always kept the train going when it came to the second album, Rose knew all too well the fear of the sophomore slump. Any band of their stature could have been labelled as a flash in the pan if they only managed to get one hit album on the charts, so if the frontman wanted to be remembered, he’d have to leave those old songs in the dust. It was time to go bigger, but maybe Use Your Illusion was a little too big.
Because looking through every single track, the double album feels like taking two completely different visions for Guns N’ Roses and smashing them on top of each other. Not every tune is a trainwreck by any means, but it’s hard to listen to a record that wants to be the most grandiose thing in the world next to songs that wouldn’t have felt out of place if they had been released as Appetite bonus tracks.
If you were to ask Rose, though, everything came back to the more downtempo tracks on the record. Whereas most people wanted to see him as this generation’s version of John Lydon, Rose was shooting to become the next Brian Wilson or Elton John, and it’s not like he didn’t come a little bit close when putting together the beginning lines of ‘November Rain’ or ‘Estranged’.
It took a lot of him to make those kinds of songs, but Rose knew it was always worth it when he heard the final product, saying at the time, “The most important songs at this point are the ones with piano, the ballads, because we haven’t really explored that side of the band yet. They’re also the most difficult songs to do – not difficult to play, but to write and pull out of ourselves. The beautiful music is what really makes me feel like an artist. The other, heavier stuff also makes me feel like an artist and can be difficult to write. But it’s harder to write about serious emotions.”
Any other musician would find this kind of thing draining, but since Rose seemed to be the only one committed to the idea, you can only imagine what the rest of the band were going through. ‘November Rain’ was bound to be a hit even at nine minutes, but if the rest of the band wanted to play tunes in the vein of tracks like ‘You Could Be Mine’, it’s not that hard to see why watching Rose work out those piano lines could feel like torture after a while.
Everyone might have their own way of looking at songwriting, but given how long it took for the fans to hear even a small piece of Chinese Democracy, Rose’s process was clearly a lot more convoluted than we thought. It was a massive undertaking to get most of Use Your Illusion finished, but who knew that those recording sessions were going to be a speed run compared to the follow-up.
