"Sweet Child O' Mine" is a hard rock song by Guns N' Roses featured on their 1987 debut studio album Appetite for Destruction and released as a single in June 1988 It became Guns N' Roses' first and only No. 1 hit on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 The crossover success of "Sweet Child O' Mine" propelled Appetite for Destruction to the top of the Billboard 200 and helped ready mainstream radio for the band's earlier single "Welcome to the Jungle" The track begins with Slash's clean, arpeggiated Les Paul riff—originally improvised as a string-skipping warm-up joke—before building into an explosive blues-rock guitar solo Axl Rose wrote the lyrics as a love letter to his then-girlfriend Erin Everly (daughter of Don Everly), drawing on Southern-rock earnestness inspired by Lynyrd Skynyrd Despite Slash's later ambivalence toward the song as "too much of a ballad," its melodic accessibility acted as the commercial Trojan horse for Guns N' Roses' raw hard-rock catalog
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