Slash says the 1987 debut doesn’t shape how he writes now, and that Guns N’ Roses pull each night’s set from around 50 songs.
Slash has carried one of the best-selling debut albums in history on his back for close to forty years. He says it plays almost no role in how he writes anything today.
The Guns N’ Roses guitarist was asked on the “Jim Kerr Rock & Roll Morning Show”, broadcast on New York classic rock station “Q104.3 FM“, whether the enormous shadow cast by 1987’s Appetite For Destruction ever interferes with the way he approaches new material.
He replied (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “No, you just write what what’s in the moment and sort of what you’re going through now. You don’t really look at past stuff. But it’s a really amazing and humbling thing that the Appetite record has become so iconic. But it’s not something that you really sort of look back at, especially something that’s that long ago.”
That same refusal to over-plan extends to the stage. Asked why the band still hands the opening slot to “Welcome To The Jungle” on the current run, Slash kept it blunt: “It’s just a good opening song. It pretty much says it all in the first few seconds. So it works pretty well.”
What follows it is far less settled than most fans assume. Slash said there is “no thought process to” how the band assembles a set on any given night.
“We just pick songs that we wanna play, and they’re from all the different records. And we don’t really have what you call a set setlist either. We have an opening song, we have an ending song, and we have a lot of tentpole songs that we’re gonna play, and then we mix a lot of stuff up. So we just have a list of, like, 50 songs. And we sort of pull from that,” he explained.
The comments arrive mid-tour. Guns N’ Roses opened the North American leg of their 2026 world tour on July 23 at Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh, North Carolina, following earlier dates in Mexico, Brazil and across Europe. The run wraps September 19 at Truist Park in Atlanta, and takes in MetLife Stadium, Busch Stadium, Allegiant Stadium, BC Place, Snapdragon Stadium and Globe Life Field along the way. The September 5 stop at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena is the band’s first appearance at the venue since October 3, 1992, during the co-headline stadium tour with Metallica.
Two standalone singles, “Nothin’” and “Atlas“, arrived in December 2025 via Geffen and have been folded into setlists alongside 2023’s “The General” and “Perhaps”. A remastered four-LP edition of Live Era ’87-’93 preceded them. Slash has said repeatedly over the past year that a full album of newly written material is in progress, without offering a timeline.
Touring alongside Axl Rose, Slash and Duff McKagan in 2026 are keyboardist Dizzy Reed, rhythm guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Isaac Carpenter, who replaced Frank Ferrer in March 2025. Keyboardist Melissa Reese, a fixture since the 2016 reunion, is absent from this year’s dates. The band announced in March that she would not be joining the tour “due to unforeseen personal reasons,” and no return date has been given.
