10 Rock Songs That Waited Years Before Being Released
6. November Rain - Guns N Roses
There is such a thing as bands trying to grow up too fast. Even though you write some of your best stuff on your “mature” albums, you have to make sure you have enough life experience under your belt to make the leap to something much more grandiose. With that in mind, Guns N Roses’ Use Your Illusion records should seem like night and day compared to Appetite for Destruction, but this was actually all planned out in the mind of Axl Rose.
Appetite was known as the gritty record that introduced the World’s Most Dangerous Band to the world, as the songs took you on a journey through the seedy underbelly of Hollywood. You aren’t getting a ton of that on Use Your Illusion, in no small part to the fact that November Rain feels like Axl trying to make an Elton John song from the ground up on here.
When doing press for the album though, November Rain was supposed to lay down the gauntlet a lot earlier, originally being in mind as a contender for the Appetite sessions until someone realized that it wasn’t quite fitting with the rest of the track list. If anything this tends to just raise more questions than it does answers. Given how compact Appetite is from start to finish, could you imagine a band going from something as visceral as Welcome to the Jungle and then going straight into some 9 minute epic?