Essential Guns N' Roses Songs
GN'R holds a spot as one of the first bands I would say I "got into" when discovering rock n roll. I mostly spent my childhood with toys and comic books, then ventured into pro-wrestling, before visiting record stores and buying music when I became a teenager. GN'R in it's original form was long broken up by then, but I'm fortunate to have been able to "meet" one of my favorite guitarists as an adult, and see him in his new incarnation with Myles Kennedy.
I'll admit I wasn't much of a fan of this song until a few summers back when I saw Slash w/Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators in concert. Slash played an extended solo that felt like it turned a 6 minute song into a 16 minute song! With so many 'classic' songs on their debut album I suppose it was lost in the shuffle.
9. "14 Years" (Use Your Illusion II)
I went back and forth over this song or "Used To Love Her". "Used to Love Her" is one of the first GN'R songs I recall liking and wanted to include it, but I ended up picking "14 Years" instead because when it comes to this band, I just want to rock, so sorry acoustic songs. Use Your Illusion II may not be their "best" album but it's one I go to most when I need to rock. For the longest time I never knew who was actually singing this song, but it's Izzy Stradlin on the verses and Axl on the chorus. The piano boosts this song's status, too.
8. "Pretty Tied Up" (Use Your Illusion II)
I feel like this is a "pretty" underated song in the GN'R catalog. Maybe that's just because I overlooked it for a long time until one night when I was on third shift it popped up on shuffle and I was caught off guard by which song I was hearing; plus "Cool Ranch Dressing" being mentioned is enough to bump up it's status. Well, it's "cool and stressing" in the actual lyrics...but that's what it sounds like to me.
7. "Nightrain" (Appetite For Destruction)
COWBELL! That's all I've got.
6. "November Rain" (Use Your Illusion I)
Epic. I used to think this song was the longest song I'd ever heard when I was growing up as it almost clocks in at 9 minutes. Oh, to be young again. The video also holds a spot as something that I thought was epic back in my young days of sneaking viewings of MTV.
One that's really grown on me over time, along with a few others from this same album, like "Bad Obsession." I'll attribute that to becoming a fan of blues-rock bands like Cry Of Love and Badlands because it has a stomp and swagger much like the catalog of those bands. Another Izzy vocal performance too.
4. "Civil War" (Use Your Illusion II)
"November Rain" might be the most epic but I like the anti-war message of this song. It seems like Axl tried to redo this song on Chinese Democracy by adding more sound bytes and calling it "Madagascar." I also thought with all of the songs on Use Your Illusion I & II, I'd stick with their own songs, even though the Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney songs are very well done, and I actually like them more than the originals. When there's so many of their own that didn't even make the cut, I felt like the covers were easy to omit.
3. "You Could Be Mine" (Use Your Illusion II)
One of my favorite movies is Terminator 2 and one of my favorite bands is Guns N' Roses, so it's only fitting that I'd like this song. It's actually my favorite, but the greatness of the debut album cannot be denied.
Possibly their most famous song and always ranked among the greatest rock n roll songs on the planet, heck it was even included in a Dirty Harry movie along with an appearance by the band. BUT... I put it at #2.
1. "Sweet Child O' Mine" (Appetite For Destruction)
I just HAD to put "Sweet Child O' Mine" at #1 for that opening riff. Slash came up with that riff as a "joke" according to legend, but the rest of the band liked it and built a song around it. I guess the best songs are always created through happenstance.
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