Guns N’ Roses · 1991

November
Rain

Nine minutes of piano, storm, and one of rock’s longest guitar solos.

“Nothin’ lasts forever
And we both know hearts can change—
And it’s hard to hold a candle
In the cold November rain.”

8:57 Album runtime — one of the longest songs
to ever chart in the U.S. Top 10.

1992 Released as a single from
Use Your Illusion I.

♪ Written by Axl Rose — he’d been
working on it since the mid-1980s.

The Epic

November Rain is Axl Rose’s power ballad — a song he reportedly obsessed over for the better part of a decade before it finally appeared on Use Your Illusion I in September 1991. It opens on a lone piano, swells into a full orchestral arrangement, and closes with Slash trading solos against the storm.

The music video, directed by Andy Morahan and inspired by a short story from Del James, became one of the most expensive ever made — a wedding, a funeral, and Slash walking out of a tiny desert chapel to play a solo under an open sky. It remains one of the most-watched pre-2000s videos on YouTube.

More than thirty years on, it’s still the song people mean when they talk about a rock band reaching for something orchestral and enormous — and mostly getting there.