Coma

A little over 10 minutes long, this is the closing track on Use Your Illusion I. It's credited to Axl Rose and Slash, but Axl described it as Slash's "baby" in an interview with MTV. Axl said he wrote the song about when he overdosed, which he says was brought on by stress. "I just grabbed this bottle of pills in an argument and gulped them down," he said. "I ended up in a hospital, but I liked that I wasn't in the fight anymore. My first real thoughts were, 'you haven't toured enough, the record's going to be forgotten, you have work to do, get out of this,' and I woke myself out of it. But in describing that, people could take it wrong and think it means go put yourself into a coma."

"I wrote 'Coma' in my heroin delirium," Slash told Guitar Magazine in 2011. "That's a song that I'm still proud of. There's not a lot of 'technique' – it's a pretty straight up kinda Slash approach. But the thing that's really interesting was the vamp-out, which was this circular rotating chord progression that never ended: the same chord progression every time, but it just kept changing key. That was my mathematical musical discovery. I just stumbled on it and it's very much me doing my thing… but it worked."