Use Your Illusion
Live And Let Die // Don't Cry // Bad Obsession
November Rain // The Garden // Don't Damn Me // Bad Apples // Coma 
Civil War // Yesterdays // Knockin' On Heaven's Door
Get In The Ring // Estranged // You Could Be Mine // My World
Appetite For Destruction // GN'R Lies // The Spaghetti Incident? / New GN'R
Live And Let Die
Slash
"It's one of those songs, like "Heaven's Door," that Axl and I have always loved. It's always been a really heavy song, but we'd never discussed it, and didn't know that we each liked it. We were talking one night about a cover song and that came up, and we're like, "Yeah! Let's do it!" So I went to rehearsal with Izzy and Matt and Duff, just to see whether we could sound good playing it, and it sounded really heavy. It's actually heavier when we play it live than it is on the record, because of the horns and synthesizer. Live it's got more bottom to it."
[No Illusions, Guitar - April, 1992]
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Don't Cry
Slash
"When I first hooked up back together with Axl and Izzy, that was the song Izzy and Axl were working on. So that was my first having to deal with another guitar player. It was on Don’t Cry. I’m going to Izzy’s house and hanging out with him to try and build up some sort of a chemistry. So that song is actually pretty classic in my mind."
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Bad Obsession
Duff
"It's a follow-up of "Brownstone", really. Actually it was written before "Brownstone". "Bad Obsession" is us objectively looking at ourselves. Duff, Slash, Axl, you're screwing up. You got a bad obsession."
Axl
"A song we wrote about a year before we wrote Mr Brownstone. It’s somewhat similar."
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November Rain
Axl
"Vocally, l purposely wanted the sound I have on that. I'm very happy with it, even though it's very abrasive. /../ One of the things like about the vocal roughness in "November Rain" is that anyone can think that they can sing it as good or better. They can feel like a part of it."
Slash
"It’s a song that when it first surfaced it was Axl playing the piano. It was way before Appetite For Destruction came out, and we’ve been ditting around with it for years. It used to be like 25 minutes long. Everything’s that’s on the record, most of it, all the melodies and all that, just came off the top of my head. When we finally decided to record it, it pretty much came naturally. There’s some new stuff in it."
"I came up with most of the picking lines that go throughout the song when Axl was playing on a piano and I played it on acoustic. Usually you get an idea in a day, whether or not the song's worth doing. If you decide the song is worth doing, then you work hard on it during the course of a night, to get it to where everybody's comfortable. It evolves after that. When we'd finally gotten an arrangement for "November Rain," years later I came up with a couple of new parts. When we went in the studio, I came up with most of those solos. The tail-end solo, that high-pitched thing, I came up with when Axl came up with the piano chords a long time ago."
[No Illusions, Guitar - April, 1992]
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The Garden
Slash
"I came up with it that day in the studio, so there wasn't much practicing involved. I had the basic idea, improvised it, and did it a couple of times. I played it overhand. This solo is particularly focused, in terms of where your energy is. I thought of Jeff Beck. That's cool. I like Jeff Beck. That's another one that was one take. It's aggressive. I think I have my regular Les Paul with the Alnico pickups that I use most of the time. The same one I used on the last record."
[No Illusions, Guitar - April, 1992]
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Don't Damn Me
Slash
"I love that song. That's one of those songs I introduced to the band that was already complete."
[No Illusions, Guitar - April, 1992]
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Bad Apples
Slash
"It's just a clean guitar [for the beginning]. I think I used a Jazz Chorus for an amp. I use that a lot. I hardly ever use a Marshall for playing really brittle, clean parts. On this particular song, for the beginning, I might have used a Strat, or I have this little Music Man guitar that Keith Richards had. I used that because it sounds great for clean stuff. This song was written complete, too."
[No Illusions, Guitar - April, 1992]
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Coma
Axl
"Writing "Coma" on "Use Your Illusion I" was so heavy I'd start to write and I'd just pass out. I tried to write that song for a year, and couldn't. l went to write it at the studio and passed out. l woke up two
hours later and sat down and wrote the whole end of the song, like, just off the top of my head. It was like, don't even know what's coming out, man, but it's coming. l think one of the best things that I've ever written was maybe the end segment of the song "Coma." It just poured out. I thanked Slash for that, because I used to curse him, going, "Man, that son of a bitch has written this thing and I've got to write to it and don't know what to
write." It was so hard; it made me feel like, "l don't know how to write, I should just quit. But I finally did write it, and l ended up feeling a lot better about a lot of situations that I expressed in that song."
Slash
"I like 'Coma' a lot. It's got a defibrillator in it- you know, the instrument that starts your heart when it's stopped. And there's some EKG beeps too. We were just fucking around, but the song is heavy, and Axl's vocals are gorgeous- I mean really amazing."
[Friend (1991) The Illusion Of Greatness, RIP - June, 1991]
"I wrote some really cool shit when I was high. There's a song called Coma, a long song, really heavy, and I wrote that loaded."
[Simmons (1991) Tears Before Bedtime?, Q - July, 1991]
"Mike put something on the little rhythm part between the chords. I don't know what he used. I was going for a certain kind of a sound. Since I don't use effects, I don't know anything about them, except for echoes. I told him what I wanted, and he managed to pull it out of his rack somehow. /../ When I wrote "Coma," it was over a pretty short period of time, but it was not a one-day song. I kept playing around with the ideas, and then tying it together. This is another song that was basically arranged when I brought it to the band. I wrote the whole song, amazingly enough, on acoustic. When I play with the band live, and electrically, I turn the volume down, tone it down for that middle section. I was actually looking forward to doing that part when we were in the studio."
[No Illusions, Guitar - April, 1992]
Duff
"We have actually got this song calld "Girth"... Well, it's not going to be called "Girth" on the album, it'll get changed, but it's such a heavy song we call it "Girth" for now. It's named after this guy Wes [Arkeen], who writes with us sometimes. He's a real little fucker,
right? but his dick, it's only about this long but it's like this wide, man! So he got the girth, right? So we call this song "girth"..."
[Wall, M. (1991) The Most Dangerous Band in the World, Hyperion]
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Civil War
Duff
"Basically it was a riff that we would do at soundchecks. Axl came up with a couple of lines at the beginning. And... I went in a peace march, when I was a little kid, with my mom. I was like four years old. For Martin Luther King. And that's when: "Did you wear the black arm band when they shot the man wo said: "Peace could last forever"". It's just true-life experiences, really."
Slash
"It's the same version, just mixed better. It was ironic in the timing when it came out. When we recorded that, it wasn't in our normal studio. I didn't have a normal amp. It was one of those things where we had to do it because we were doing it for a benefit album, and it was a rush thing. The song was great, but Steven couldn't play. It took two days just to get the drums. That's out of the norm for us. I had to use a rented amp, and I wasn't particularly happy with the sound. Then Clink tried to mix it in a couple of different studios. I wasn't happy with the mix, and we usually don't use Clink to mix. We sat in on the mix, but I couldn't get it right. I don't like the studio. When it came time to use it for our album, we had it mixed by Bill Price, who is awesome."
[No Illusions, Guitar - April, 1992]
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Yesterdays
Slash
"Yeah, it is a Strat. That was a conscious thing I went for. Even though there's not many notes, it was just a sound and a feel. After I did the basic track, I knew that's what I wanted to sound like. /../ Axl wrote that [the piano ending] and I think that was a part of it. When we did it in the studio, he might have extended it a bit more."
[No Illusions, Guitar - April, 1992]
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Knockin' On Heaven's Door
Axl
"And there are times when everybody comes together, like in singing "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." That's one reason we do the song: it's for people."
Slash
"I was staying at someone’s apartment and Axl was at his place and we were on the phone talking about covers for the shows at the Marquee in London, and that song came up, and I was like "I have always wanted to do that song." And he was like "Yeah, that’ll be awesome!" So we went to the Marquee and did it at soundcheck and just did it that night. It’s gone through a lot of changes over the years. Actually we had a punkrock version of it at first, and we finally mellowed it out to an actual song that sounds like we thought it should sound like. But that was while recording. When we play it live it’s sort of a cross-over. Very hard and heavy, but at the same time sort of like the album."
"There's two solo sections on that song. I'd been playing those solos off-the-cuff since we started playing that song. But when we went in the studio to do it, I played it completely differently than I've ever played it. I did this whole melody off the top of my head. I did one solo one day, and then the next solo the next day, and they're both one take. /../ The outro solo on "Heaven's Door," I did the first day after I came up with the melody for the first solo. I did the second one and he [Mike Clink] wasn't really happy with it. I thought it was fine. I took it home and listened to it. The next morning, on my way somewhere, I stopped by the studio and just pulled it off one more time and did it way better."
[No Illusions, Guitar - April, 1992]
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Get In The Ring
Axl
""Get In The Ring" was a song that was… basically put together by Slash and Duff, and I came up with the low vocal part. And Slash and I wrote that part together. We wrote different verses. And we wrote a whole song that when the whole band actually had the song together, the words didn't fit the arrangement of the song. And so, we were in Toronto, playing a show in Toronto. And we had one last song to finish recording, that was "Get In The Ring".
So, we went in the studio and just kind of started putting things together. And then Duff decided that I should express my feelings about how we've been treated by the press, because that was his initial concept for the song, and that I should just go for it. And I was kind of like: "Are you sure? You sure I should do this?". And then Tom Zutaut, of Geffen, was there and he was like: "Go for it."
So I got behind the mike and went for it. And everybody was really happy and we just decided to do it. And this naming names, and things like that, were because most bands can't afford to express how they feel about how they're treated in the press, because they need the press so much. And I know that this could hurt us, but we're in a position where I think we owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to an element of the public..."
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Estranged
Axl
"There's something really wild, for me, in performing "Estranged" 'cause all of a sudden I realized I don't want to be sitting at the piano playing this song to keep the energy of the song moving live. I need to be moving around and there's something about being able to be up there moving around during it that's actually a present, a gift or something. Being able to dance and rejoice in a song. That came from situations and emotions that were killing me."
[Nadler (1992) Axl Gets In The Ring, Metallix - 1992]
Slash
"It's one of Axl's babies, where he sat down and he had something he really wanted to express, and he wrote it on piano. And so there came the time when the band had to figure out where the bass is gonna come in, where the guitar is gonna come in. This and that. And so, I did all the guitar arrangements on it and wrote the guitar melodies, which are pretty important to the song now, I would say. 'Cause you recognize 'em, you know. That's that. That's why I have credit on it."
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You Could Be Mine
Slash
"When we were at S.I.R Studios doing pre-productions for Appetite. That was one of the songs that were gonna be on the Appetite. We hadn’t really finished it in time to put it on album so we sat it on backburner until we did Use Your Illusion."
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My World
Axl
"My World" happened when we’re sitting and were bored. We’ve been working on "Live and Let Die" the whole night and it was early in the morning. I’d been listening to a lot of industrial music and all of a sudden I said, "Hey man, let's do something. Let's see what happens. Let's just make it short and sweet and see what we come up with." In three hours we wrote and recorded the song. /../ I'll expose a little more of myself - we were also on 'shrooms. A friend of mine had stuck some mushrooms in my tea and I didn't know it. All of a sudden we were being really mellow. So it was kind of a socio-psychotic state of bliss."
[Flanagan (1992) Shadow Boxing With Axl Rose, Musician - June, 1992]
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