Sweet Child O' Mine

It opens with an accident: Slash noodling a string-skipping exercise he thought was a joke, now one of the most recognizable figures ever committed to tape, circling in bright clean tone before the band crashes in behind it. Sweet Child O' Mine is the strangest thing on Appetite for Destruction because it's sincere. Axl Rose, whose default register is a razored shriek, sings the verses almost tenderly, in a nasal high croon that keeps cracking toward vulnerability, then unloads on the chorus. The lyric is plain to the point of being naive — eyes reminding him of a childhood place, hair reminding him of a warm safe memory — written for Erin Everly, and its power comes from that plainness sitting inside a band famous for squalor. Then the outro turns it inside out: the key drops, the tempo drags, and Axl starts asking "where do we go now" over and over with mounting dread, as if the love song has realized it has no future. Mike Clink's production keeps the drums tight and the guitars stacked but unglossy, resisting the 1987 Aqua Net treatment. It's the wedding-slow-dance song and the last-call song, depending entirely on how far into the night you are.