Blackstar

Why un-GN'R? The majority of GN'R songs are 3-5 minutes long.

When was that?

Yeah, some people can't cope with the idea that CD era songs have guitar work that they like and it's Slash, so it can't be, it must be Bucket or Robin

Yeah, that press release was retracted eventually.

Yeah, it will be interesting to see if it will be AFD style (credited to the band and each one getting near equal share of the publishing), UYI style (credits to individual writers but blanket deal according to each one's contributions) or CD style (credits to individual writers and Axl getting a minimum of 50% of the publishing). Currently is a hybrid of AFD and CD (credited to the band but the publishing is split as I described in the previous post). My guess is that in the case of a new album of original material it will be a hybrid of AFD and UYI style.

Judging from Absurd and Hard Skool (we don't have this kind of information for Perhaps and The General/Monsters yet), it seems that it doesn't and Axl gets ~50% of the credits for lyrics/melodies/production and more if he wrote part of the music, as on CD. It also looks like that there's probably a blanket deal for a combined 15% for Slash and Duff on all songs as a whole, but which may be higher or lower than that on each song separately, depending on how many other writers there are besides Axl. For example, on Absurd Slash and Duff's combined share is 21% (with Dizzy having 30% and Axl 49%), whereas on Hard Skool Slash and Duff's combined share is 11.5% and another 11.5% is divided between Tommy, Paul and Robin.

A better example would be Think About You and Don't Cry. Aside from the solos, there are no significant differences between the versions with Tracii Guns and Rob Gardner (that can be heard in the 1985 interview) and the released versions - they were the same songs as far as structure and arrangement. However, Slash and Duff (and Steven in the case of Think About You) got credits. Same with Hollywood Rose songs that became GN'R songs (probably with the exception of Anything Goes and maybe Back Off Bitch). I see what's happening with the credits now as a repetition of that.

I hear "it's all burnt down" too.

Axl was also in the cusp of releasing CD in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2006, but the album was eventually released in 2008 (and, according to Tommy Stinson, Iovine grabbed it from Axl's hands, so if it weren't for that it would have probably have been released a year later). And since he didn't release CD2 until 2014, there's no guarantee that it would have happened in 2015 or 2016 if it weren't for the reunion. The odds for that to happen were the same as before. These songs should have been released when they were recorded featuring the musicians who co-wrote and played on them. It's not Slash's fault that they weren't. So the way things turned out, NuGnR fans should thank Slash and be grateful for the threeunion instead of complaining about it, because otherwise we probably wouldn't have gotten these songs yet. The threeunion may be a "nostalgia cash grab" touring endlessly, but at least the songs that comprise the vast majority of the setlist are played by some of the people who wrote tehm, and we got some new music (even if it's rehashed CD era songs), plus two archival releases. Vs. the nostalgia touring and zero releases of the pre-reunion NuGnR lineup.

With all that, and most importantly if they were not a hybrid of "new" band and and AFD cover band, they would have done better than they eventually did. But they would have never had the impact and success the original band had, because of the name. Axl would have had a bigger chance to succeed under another moniker (I'm not saying as a solo project because I don't want to start another debate on that in this thread), provided, of course, that he didn't fuck it up too hard.

Yes, the lineup Axl had recruited was talented. And yes, if there wasn't the no-show in Philly, maybe Buckethead wouldn't have left (and also the album would have probably been released sooner). But no, they wouldn't have taken the world by storm. That's just a fantasy.

The odds for Me and My Elvis and Soul Monster being the same song were equal to them being different songs. The word "Elvis" in the title was an just an indication that they could be the same song, however most people took it as evidence and turned it into a "fact", although there were also strong indications suggesting the contrary, like that, as per Axl, the earliest working title of Soul Monster (Leave Me Alone) didn't have "Elvis" in it. Me and My Elvis was probably just a random working title the band members that wrote the instrumental came up with, maybe an inside joke. It generally looks like that the earliest working titles were given by the band members in the case of tracks that originated from them and not Axl, whereas the tracks that originated from Axl and developed by the band had working titles that he gave them (e.g. Jackie Chan, Oklahoma); and then Axl would either change or keep the same working title the band members came up with when he would start working on the lyrics. So it seems that Soul Monster was originally Leave Me Alone (working title) adn then Axl changed it to Elvis Presley and The Monster Of Soul when he started working on the lyrics or at least had the subject matter in his mind. And the song probably was part of the same batch of Brain tracks The General and Seven were from. Axl seemed to refer to The General and Soul Monster as two separate songs in 2008, so it was definitely after that point that were probably paired into a two-part suite. Bach didn't compare the General to Estranged in terms of "epicness", he just said that Axl told him it was a sequel to Estranged, presumably lyrically. As for what became of Me and My Elvis, who knows. Maybe it was completed under another title, maybe not.

And Elvis Presley was the only rock music his stepfather allowed him to listen to.

That doesn't mean that their parts would have been removed. Axl kept most of Buckethead's parts on CD, although he had left in 2003. Also all Bumblefoot's recordings on CD material took place in 2006 and 2007, and it doesn't seem that he did anything afterwards. Ashba doesn't seem to have recorded on CD material at all.

I don't think you can compare live renditions (of CD songs) with studio recordings. Regarding the comparison with what Slash did on the other studio recordings, I think maybe he spend more time and put more effort working on The General/Monsters, because their "nature" required it. The other three songs are fairly simple, so he treated them accordingly. Also, although he said that he recorded everything during Covid, there are a few indications that some of them - or Hard Skool at least - were recorded earlier than that. So he probably worked on Hard Skool, Absurd and maybe Perhaps, too, during 2019 and The General/Monsters and whatever else during Covid when he had a lot of time to concentrate.

Besides the fact that it's been registered as one song, this scenario would work in that way only if the supposed Atlas/Monsters release followed relatively soon, e.g. in a couple of months and not after a year or whenever the next tour cycle is. And I don't think that's very likely.

There is also something like a "cutting effect" (I don't know what the technical term is) after "dynamic duo", which may serve as a "full stop" at that point. Like, "Dynamic duo. Seen your figure/vigor crashing". So I think "dynamic duo" may refer to the two previous lines: "A tour-de-force of an evil old passion" and "A broken heart that was out of fashion make a dynamic duo. And what follows "dynamic duo" doesn't relate directly to it.

Could it be "vigor" instead of "figure" in the first verse of Monsters?

I guess that's plausible. I think that the vast majority of the material was finished instrumentally by 2001. But the vocals are a bit of an unknown territory, because even the band members were not always (I'd say they weren't most of the time) privy to what Axl was doing after they finished recording their parts. It's evident from a few of their interviews that they didn't know if Axl had recorded vocals or not.

Another interview. Duff says he may tour his album in spring and meanwhile he will probably release more material. He implies that the extension of the GN'R tour kind of messed up the release of Lighthouse: https://blabbermouth.net/news/duff-mckagan-wants-to-play-some-really-cool-shows-in-support-of-his-lighthouse-album

No, I'm just interpreting it as "eventually", because I don't think Axl recorded vocals on it at that time, considering that Marco Beltrami said that it didn't have vocals when he worked on it in the summer of 2002.

He said he wrote it and turned it to RTB in late 2000 during the months leading up to the House of Blues show. He didn't say it had vocals at that point, he only vaguely said that he thought Axl eventually sang on it.

But it was never confirmed that Me and My Elvis was Soul Monster. That was just a conclusion that fans jumped into because of "Elvis" in the title. He was the co-producer (alongside with Axl), but not the mixer. According to the official credits, Perhaps was mixed by Joe Barresi.

Well, that might actually be true for Oklahoma. It may very well be a similar case to Hard Skool: most likely dating from 1996, but without Slash having involvement in writing it, so Axl had it developed later by the NuGnR guys. I think it's likely that even Perhaps originates from Axl/Paul Tobias sessions in the mid-90s.

Perhaps was not mixed by Caram, so it's safe to say that these have not been mixed by him either, so maybe they have actually gotten rid of him.