Guns N' Roses
Axl Rose dreamed the piano melody for "November Rain" in the early 1980s, before Guns N' Roses had formed as a band. He carried the unfinished song for years, telling interviewers: "If it's not recorded right, I'll quit the business." He spent eight hours in the studio selecting string sounds alone, testing what he described as "three thousand sounds," to build his own 130-piece orchestra without a traditional arranger. At nearly nine minutes, it became the longest song ever to reach the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In our deep dive into November Rain, we trace the song from a teenage piano dream to its $1.5 million music video, and what it reveals about a songwriter who refused to release something until the world could hear it the way he had imagined it.
