APPETITE FOR DISCUSSION
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APPETITE FOR DISCUSSION
Welcome to Appetite for Discussion -- a Guns N' Roses fan forum!

Please feel free to look around the forum as a guest, I hope you will find something of interest. If you want to join the discussions or contribute in other ways then you need to become a member. We especially welcome anyone who wants to share documents for our archive or would be interested in translating or transcribing articles and interviews.

Registering is free and easy.

Cheers!
SoulMonster

Paradise City

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Paradise City Empty Paradise City

Post by Soulmonster Wed Aug 04, 2010 7:09 pm

Paradise City Newbor11
PARADISE CITY
Album:
Appetite for Destruction, 1987, track no. 6.



Written by:
Guns N' Roses.

Musicians:
Vocals: Axl Rose; lead guitar: Slash; rhythm guitar: Izzy Stradlin; bass: Duff McKagan; drums: Steven Adler.

Live performances:
The song was played for the first time at The Troubadour on October 10, 1985. All incarnations of Guns N' Roses have played this song live. In total it has, as of {UPDATEDATE}, at least been played {PARADISESONGS} times.
Lyrics:

Just a' urchin livin' under the street
I'm a hard case that's tough to beat
I'm your charity case
So buy me somethin' to eat
I'll pay you at another time
Take it to the end of the line

Ragz to richez or so they say
Ya gotta keep pushin' for the fortune and fame
It's all a gamble
When it's just a game
Ya treat it like a capital crime
Everybody's doin' their time

Take me down
To the paradise city
Where the grass is green
And the girls are pretty
Take me home

Strapped in the chair of the city's gas chamber
Why I'm here I can't quite remember
The surgeon general says it's hazardous to breathe
I'd have another cigarette but I can't see
Tell me who ya gonna believe
     
Take me down
To the paradise city
Where the grass is green
And the girls are pretty
Take me home

So far away
So far away
So far away
So far away

Captain America's been torn apart
Now he's a court jester with a broken heart
He said -
Turn me around and take me back to the start
I must be losin' my mind - "Are you blind?"
I've seen it all a million times
     
Take me down
To the paradise city
Where the grass is green
And the girls are pretty
Take me home


Quotes regarding the song and its making:

Talking about writing the song:

During those first rehearsals, the five of us started working up a new song together based on some lyrics I had brought with me in a notebook from Seattle. The song became 'Paradise City,' and it started to gel in those few days before our Troubadour show [June 6, 1985] and he trip to Seattle [The Hell Tour].
Duff's autobiography, "It's So Easy", 2011, p. 70

Not all our songs are written about somebody else. 'Paradise City' is more about me and the streets. Duff wrote the first part of the chorus, Izzy wrote the second part, and Slash wrote the melody of the last half of the chorus... See, that's the best, just that the whole band is into it, and everybody puts their two cents in. That's the true Guns N' Roses that we come up with a song we believe in, and that we feel hits the mark.
Hit Parader, March, 1988

Not all our songs are written about somebody else. 'Paradise City' is more about me and the streets. Duff wrote the first part of the chorus, Izzy wrote the second part, and Slash wrote the melody of the last half of the chorus... See, that's the best, just that the whole band is into it, and everybody puts their two cents in. That's the true Guns N' Roses that we come up with a song we believe in, and that we feel hits the mark.
Rock Scene, April 1988

The chords to [Paradise City] I wrote when I first moved to L.A., when I didn't know anybody and was kinda feeling a little down. So that kinda came out, like reaching for something. you know [...]. If one person brings in a song to this band, it always gets raped by the other four people. It always gets changed around to where it its Guns N' Roses.
Hit Parader, March 1988

Listen to "Paradise City," the actual riff is heavy as far as heavy goes. but at the same time I have a major blues thing happening. The stuff I play is bluesy but I play the bluesy stuff heavily or at least that's the way I approach everything.
Guitar For The Practising Musician, September 1988

[...] as we developed songs, we put a lot of emphasis on anything that veered away from the main melody - we all felt that diverging from a good tune was only justifiable if the other part was just as good. That meant we rejected cookie-cutter songwriting that demanded bridges for bridges' sake and strictly delineated between verses and choruses. Instead we only went places we really felt strongly about. There's a reason the codas in songs like 'Rocket Queen,' 'Paradise City,' or 'Patience' sound so distinctive - we didn't feel compelled to add them; we were just so excited about certain ideas that, working together, day after day, we found ways to incorporate them.
Duff's autobiography, "It's So Easy", 2011, p. 96-97

"Paradise City" we wrote before we were thinking about going in the studio.
Guitar For The Practising Musician, September 1988

The verses are more about being in the jungle; the chorus is like being back in the mid-west or somewhere. It reminds me of when I was a little kid and just looked up at the blue sky and went: "wow, what is all this? It's so big out there." Everything was more innocent. There are parts of the song that have more of a down home feel. And when I started putting the overlays of my vocals (I put five tracks on there), it seemed that it came out like some Irish or Scottish heritage. One of the weird things is I had a feeling that it would go over good in Europe.
Hit Parader, March, 1988

The best songs we do, they're collaborations. The best way to do it is to have the whole band sit there and listen to everybody else's ideas, and put it all together to make something that everybody enjoys playing.
Hit Parader, March, 1988

'Paradise City' is more about me and the streets. Duff wrote the first part of the chorus, Izzy wrote the second part, and Slash wrote the melody of the last half of the chorus....
Rock Scene, April 1988

We were in the van, coming back from San Fransisco to L.A., and we just started playing the basic chords - it was on acoustic at the time. Then we got into this 'Take me down to the paradise city, where the girls are fat and they got big titties' thing. I think initially it started out with 'the grass is green,' and I thought, 'That's lame!' But we ended up keeping the 'grass is green' thing. The 'big titty' thing was just my own problem.
Guitar One, June 2001

We were in our rental van, drinking and playing acoustic guitar, when I came up with the jangly intro to what became 'Paradise City'. Duff and Izzy picked it up and started playing  it while I came up with the chord changes. I started humming a melody and played it over and over. Then Axl chimed in. "Take me down to the Paradise City." I kept playing and tossed off some impromptu lyrics. "Where the grass is green and girls are pretty," I sang. I thought that sounded totally gay. "Take me down to Paradise City," Axl sang again. "Where the girls are fat and they've got big titties!" I shouted. (...) I expanded on the basic structure of the song as everyone improvised lyrics in rounds as if we were on a bus heading off to rock-and-roll summer camp, as the L.A. skyline came into view, I suppose we were. After we got the whole chorus rolling, that's when I slammed into the big heavy riff that anchors the song. And that's the moment that 'Paradise City' became my favorite Guns N' Roses song.
Bozza, Anthony, & Slash (2007). Slash. Harper Entertainment: New York

We had a manager [Vicky Hamilton] courting us at that time, and she gave us a ride to San Francisco to play a gig with Jetboy. While heading back in the van, we started writing 'Paradise City.' It started off with those basic chords and then the melody, and I remember writing the words. Originally it was 'Take me down to Paradise City where the girls are fat and they got big titties' [laughs], which we changed into 'where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.'
Guitar Edge Magazine, March 2007

Paradise City I had a lyric for that, you know, with three chords.

Paradise City was a song that… we were as a band in a van with a manager named Bridget that we had. And we were heading up to San Francisco to play a date with a band called Jetboy at a club called The Stone in the city up north. And I don't know if it was on the way there or on the way back, but the beginnings of Paradise City came. And it was all of us together. I had an acoustic guitar and there was that chord changes which I had, and then there was the melody of, or the lyrics that Axl came up with, or something to that effect. But whatever it was, it was very much that kind of magic band moment where guys were all just sort of creating something out of thin air together. And it was a fun time, and that was the very beginning of that song. I think the chorus and the words and the melody all came from that van ride. And then we finished the song back in our... I'm trying to think where we were living right now at that time. But wherever it was, we finished the rest of the song there. But it was a magic moment where the whole band very naturally collaborated without any sort of outside kind of pressure or without anybody trying to get involved in what we were doing. Because as you get bigger down the line, there's always people sort of stepping in, trying to have some influence on what you're doing. So this was a very sort of pure and innocent moment, you know, that I feel like was recorded in that song.


Introducing the song:

This next song is a brand new one, 'Take Me Home to the Paradise City'.
The Troubadour, October 10, 1985

We just wrote this one today so, hey hey.
The Troubadour, October 10, 1985

This song is about a half an hour old.
The Troubadour, October 10, 1985


Talking about recording the song:

Most of the harmonies and stuff I came up with, like in 'It's So Easy' and 'Paradise City', I came up with the night I was recording those parts, 'cause I never had the opportunity to work on it before.
Interview with Axl by Steve Harris, December 1987

[The mixing on] 'Paradise City' could have been a little clearer.
Interview with Axl by Steve Harris, December 1987

There's a long lead on the end of "Paradise City," which was basically improvised.
Guitar For The Practising Musician, September 1988

[...] it’s the only place on the album where I got to do an extended guitar solo. Everything is usually contained within a certain amount of bars.

There were only two things that I found difficult while recording my overdubs for Appetite. The first was the solo at the end of 'Paradise City,' which was always easy live but wasn't in the studio. In concert, it could last anywhere from one to two minutes, but on the album version of the song, it was designed to be exactly thirty seconds. Si it wasn't easy for me to focus the same narrative and emotion into thirty seconds, and when the red light came on, it threw me for a loop - I actually got gun-shy. I remember going at it a few times and getting so frustrated that I just left the studio completely disappointed; the next day, though, I came in fresh and nailed it.
Bozza, Anthony, & Slash (2007). Slash. Harper Entertainment: New York, pp 176

[Being asked about standout moments while recording Appetite]: And when we were playing “Paradise City,” at the very end of it the double-time part? I was looking at Slash and going, “Goddammit, c’mon, let’s end this already. C’mon. Dammit. You’re killin’ me over here. Let’s go!” While I’m playin’ the song, you can see my lips moving and I’m yellin’ at ‘em, “Dammit, let’s end this already.”


About the keyboard, Steven saying it was Clink's idea, Slash saying it was Axl's:

[Mike Clink] had the idea to add a vintage Moog synthesizer to the beginning of 'Paradise City' and again, that ended up sounding great. (...) 'Paradise City' came on [the band hearing the album for the first time], and at the end of it, where it's got my drum fill that sounds like a double bass, I noticed something different. I know I did that fill only once in the studio. But Slash had the idea to repeat it somehow. I asked him right then and there, and he admitted the idea came to him in the studio. The second fill is actually the first fill played backwards. (...) I had always played it, live onstage, with just one fill. But it worked and it was completely all right with me because I respected Slash's call.
"My Appetite for Destruction", 2010

Axl had introduced a screaming synth line in 'Paradise City,' back in the Appetite days. That was the start of [adding synths and keyboard to GN'R songs], I suppose, and I was opposed to that, too.
Bozza, Anthony, & Slash (2007). Slash. Harper Entertainment: New York, pp 176

[The synth] didn't come on until Axl was putting his vocals down on the record, so I had no idea about that until we got to the mixing stage. All of a sudden there was that part. Being the guitar purists that we were, Izzy and I were like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" But Axl won that battle, so it stayed on there. All things considered, it was never that big a deal, but it introduced a certain electronic thing that didn't fit well. Axl had a tendency to do that from time to time - to bring it in on the back end.
Guitar Edge Magazine, March 2007


Talking about the song:

I dig the groove. Always have.
Guitar For The Practising Musician, September 1988

I should say 'Paradise City' [is the song I feel closest to]. It's an ironic title inspired by the many nights I had to sleep in a pick-up truck of a friend of mine because I had no place to go. Well, at least it was parked in a parking lot! [Laughs.]

'Paradise City' is still my favorite. We wrote that as a band, all five of us together in a van, on our way back to L.A. after a gig in San Francisco. There's a lot of spirit and energy there, it just encapsulates a lot about that time period for me.
Classic Rock Magazine, July 2007

You can't help getting into watching people go bonkers for "Paradise City [at live shows]," that's always a kick in the pants.
LA Weekly Blog, December 2011


Brain talking about an early morning rehearsal of Paradise City for the 2001 Rock In Rio show with pyros and confetti going off, and praising Steven's footwork:

Fucking shuffle, 7:30 in the morning, just the boogie woogie shuffle is I think what took me out. The [makes drumming sound] and then going like this stupidity and me going like, "Shit! I wonder if I can really do at 7:30 in the morning what Adler was doing on the album, which is three notes in a row?" [claps how Steven drummed on Paradise City] Not [claps a different rhythm]. He's fucking doing [claps the first rhythm again]. With fucking one foot. I couldn't do it. 7:30 in the morning with the confetti, not good enough. If the confetti wasn't there, I could have pulled it [laughing]. That's like the dumb drummer in me that I was thinking, "Oh, maybe if there was any meaning to this is that I could, you know, like get the [taps the correct drum pattern again]," but nah, I couldn't do it. [...] that's hard to play. With one foot it's really hard to play. [...] he might have not had to do it at 7:30 with the confetti.



Paradise City Newbor11


Last edited by Soulmonster on Mon Feb 26, 2024 4:42 pm; edited 13 times in total
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Post by Soulmonster Sun Jul 23, 2017 6:20 pm

Michael Gallucci wrote:Guns N’ Roses (Sorta) Celebrate the Good Life in ‘Paradise City': The Story Behind Every ‘Appetite for Destruction’ Song

Most of the songs on Guns N’ Roses‘ groundbreaking debut album Appetite for Destruction take a dark, despairing look at the dangerous underside of life.

And none of the songs, going against the mid-’80s trend of using synthesizers in hard-rock songs to make them for accessible for pop-conditioned ears, features much more than the basic guitars/bass/drums/vocals setup that had been in place for rock ‘n’ roll records since the ’60s.

“Paradise City” was the exception to both. Sorta.

The sixth song on the band’s rafters- and industry-shaking album, which came out on July 21, 1987, was one of the few Appetite songs that gave some breathing room, for a little while at least, to the gutter-level observations found elsewhere. And the mood-lifting synth, played by Axl Rose, that underlines the song pushes it toward a more open-ended space than the claustrophobic and harrowing corners found in tracks like “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Nightrain” and “Mr. Brownstone.”

Like many of the songs on Appetite for Destruction, “Paradise City” began as a group collaboration, and it was one of their first. According to guitarist Slash, who related the story in his 2007 autobiography, the band — Rose, Slash, guitarist Izzy Stradlin, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Steven Adler — was returning to its home in Los Angeles from a gig in San Francisco in a rented van. There was alcohol and acoustic guitars involved, and they eventually led to the song’s familiar riff.

Soon, Rose started singing the song’s refrain, and everyone started to chip in, adding musical and lyrical amendments along the way. Slash preferred his own chorus — “Take me down to the Paradise City / Where the girls are fat and they’ve got big titties” — to the one that the rest of the band favored and was eventually used: “Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.”

it wasn’t long before the band had the seeds for one of its most popular songs. And it’s one that more or less celebrated the good life rather than uncovered the druggy despair of the Los Angeles streets that they were better known for. Though that relatively festive chorus often belies the darker undercurrent found in the verses. “Strapped in the chair of the city’s gas chamber / Why I’m here I can’t quite remember / The Surgeon General says it’s hazardous to breathe / I’d have another cigarette but I can’t see,” Rose sings at one point.

“The verses are more about being in the jungle,” Rose told Hit Parader in 1988, a nod to the fight-to-survive mindset heard throughout Appetite. “The chorus is like being back in the Midwest or somewhere.” (Rose, like the other members of Guns N’ Roses, wasn’t a Los Angeles native. He was from Indiana.)

Guns N’ Roses smartly play off this dichotomy with a bit of musical juxtaposition: The singalong choruses (the song starts with one rather than a verse) are delivered with a smooth arpeggio. The verses, in almost direct contrast, are tougher and choppier, as Rose spits out the words over chugging, distorted guitars.

The riff itself has roots in other bands and songs, including Hanoi Rocks, one of Rose’s favorite bands and whose former guitarist Nasty Suicide appears in “Paradise City”‘s video (which captures them onstage from a pair of performances during their breakout year), and Black Sabbath, whose “Zero the Hero” from 1983’s Born Again was noted in the book The Top 500 Heavy Metal Songs of All Time as an influence. Guns N’ Roses have never directly acknowledged these similarities, but the lines from earlier hard-rock bands to their own music have never been hidden.

Clocking in at almost seven minutes, “Paradise City” is the longest song on Appetite for Destruction, a fact somewhat concealed by the track’s final couple of minutes, when it kicks into double time and essentially turns into a harder and faster kind of beast — almost a different song at that point.

No surprise that the song was pulled from the album as its fourth single — following “It’s So Easy,” “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine” — in November 1988. The edited single followed “Child” and “Jungle” (after it was re-released in October 1988 on the heels of “Sweet Child o’ Mine”‘s No. 1 showing) into the Top 10, making it all the way to No. 5. (It climbed to No. 6 in the U.K., where Guns N’ Roses were quickly repeating their U.S. success.)

As with many of the band’s songs from this fertile period, “Paradise City” almost immediately earned its classic status. The song has served as Guns N’ Roses’ closing concert number for most of their career, and has been named by Slash as his all-time favorite song by the band.

It’s infiltrated pop culture too, showing up in video games, at sporting events, in movies (Tom Cruise sings the song at the beginning of 2012’s Rock of Ages), in trailers and even on that terrible “metal” album Pat Boone released in 1997.

By the time “Paradise City” was making its way into the Top 10, Appetite for Destruction had already logged five weeks at No. 1 on the album chart and was on its way to selling more than 30 million copies across the globe. The album remains the biggest-selling debut LP ever. It signaled Guns N’ Roses’ dominance at a time when rock ‘n’ roll desperately needed a band to kick it back into shape. They were more than happy to oblige.
Source: http://ultimateclassicrock.com/guns-n-roses-paradise-city/
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Post by Soulmonster Tue Aug 01, 2017 7:37 pm

The director of the music video, Nigel Dick, reminisces:

Dick explains why working with someone as charismatic and unpredictable as Axl Rose is a blessing and a curse. "Your concern at the time is, 'Is he going to stay?' You're thinking I've got to get some stuff of Axl on film. Slash and the other guys [will] hang around, because there's some girls and some booze here, so they're fine. But with Axl, it's much more complex than that. I became, for a while, the go-to guy for that kind of band, and I'd get all these awful band managers coming up to me, 'The job you did for that band was amazing, man, so you've got to do for my band what you did for Guns N' Roses' and you just go, 'Oh my God.' If the guy ain't Axl, he ain't Axl. You can be the best video director in the world, but if the lead singer doesn't have his oats together, you're fucked.""
Source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/guns-n-roses-video-history-behind-the-scenes-of-the-appetite-clips-20070803
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Post by Blackstar Sun Sep 08, 2019 12:07 am

Review of the single in RAW Magazine, March 7, 1989.

Thanks to @Surge for sending it!

Paradise City 1989-011
GUNS n' ROSES
'Paradise City’
(Geffen GEF 50)


YOU MAY have heard of Guns n’ Roses by now; they're a little five-piece combo from LA who sound a bit like Aerosmith. According to those who voted it the Greatest Rock Album Of All Time (RAW Readers' Poll Of Polls, Ish. Nine), their debut studio LP (‘Appetite For Destruction') isn’t a bad effort, either. So may I suggest that this single (backed by 'Used To Love Her' from the 'Lies...' LP) might be a hit?

Oh yeah, and England will win the 1966 World Cup.


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Post by Soulmonster Fri Jan 08, 2021 1:50 pm

New "old" quote from Slash:

[...] it’s the only place on the album where I got to do an extended guitar solo. Everything is usually contained within a certain amount of bars.
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Post by Soulmonster Sun Aug 22, 2021 6:52 am

[Being asked about standout moments while recording Appetite]: And when we were playing “Paradise City,” at the very end of it the double-time part? I was looking at Slash and going, “Goddammit, c’mon, let’s end this already. C’mon. Dammit. You’re killin’ me over here. Let’s go!” While I’m playin’ the song, you can see my lips moving and I’m yellin’ at ‘em, “Dammit, let’s end this already.”
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Post by Soulmonster Mon Feb 07, 2022 5:49 pm

Being asked which song off Appetite he feels closest to:

I should say "Paradise City.' It's an ironic title inspired by the many nights I had to sleep in a pick-up truck of a friend of mine because I had no place to go. Well, at least it was parked in a parking lot! [Laughs.]
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Post by Soulmonster Mon Jan 23, 2023 3:06 pm

Brain talking about an early morning rehearsal of Paradise City for the 2001 Rock In Rio show with pyros and confetti going off, and praising Steven's footwork:

Fucking shuffle, 7:30 in the morning, just the boogie woogie shuffle is I think what took me out. The [makes drumming sound] and then going like this stupidity and me going like, "Shit! I wonder if I can really do at 7:30 in the morning what Adler was doing on the album, which is three notes in a row?" [claps how Steven drummed on Paradise City] Not [claps a different rhythm]. He's fucking doing [claps the first rhythm again]. With fucking one foot. I couldn't do it. 7:30 in the morning with the confetti, not good enough. If the confetti wasn't there, I could have pulled it [laughing]. That's like the dumb drummer in me that I was thinking, "Oh, maybe if there was any meaning to this is that I could, you know, like get the [taps the correct drum pattern again]," but nah, I couldn't do it. [...] that's hard to play. With one foot it's really hard to play. [...] he might have not had to do it at 7:30 with the confetti.
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Post by ludurigan Sun Jul 09, 2023 12:57 am

Brazilian singer-songwriter Letrux uses the chorus of "Paradise" City as a live intro for her song "Teste Psicológico Animal" on the "debut" show of her new tour, July 07, 2023, at the Teatro Prudential in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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Post by Soulmonster Thu Aug 17, 2023 3:37 pm

Paradise City I had a lyric for that, you know, with three chords.
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Post by Soulmonster Mon Feb 19, 2024 11:46 am

Steve Thompson, who mixed the record with Mike Barbiero, would talk about how a mixing joke ended up in the released version:

We have, but there was one story I think I'll tell you on Paradise City. We did a goof with Axl. There's a spot in the song towards the end in the vamp where Axl's going, [sings] “Take me home…” that part before it builds into the outro. And so we were cutting tape and I told Barbiero, “Let's double up that part just as a goof”, right? So it goes, [sings the music] “…take me home”. Then we hit the edit, [sings the music] “…take me home” again. This is all tape, there's no digital anything when we're doing this stuff. And we did it as a goof. So we played it back to the band and it comes up to that section, I'm waiting there everybody to go nuts. Axl hears it, he listened to it and he goes, “Stop the tape!” He goes, “What was that?” “Ah, we got you, Axl”. He goes, “I fucking loved that”. And we wound up leaving it into it. With that I mean, you would never think that that was actually left in there. But he loved it. So that wound up being in the mix.
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Paradise City Empty Re: Paradise City

Post by Soulmonster Mon Feb 26, 2024 4:41 pm

Paradise City was a song that… we were as a band in a van with a manager named Bridget that we had. And we were heading up to San Francisco to play a date with a band called Jetboy at a club called The Stone in the city up north. And I don't know if it was on the way there or on the way back, but the beginnings of Paradise City came. And it was all of us together. I had an acoustic guitar and there was that chord changes which I had, and then there was the melody of, or the lyrics that Axl came up with, or something to that effect. But whatever it was, it was very much that kind of magic band moment where guys were all just sort of creating something out of thin air together. And it was a fun time, and that was the very beginning of that song. I think the chorus and the words and the melody all came from that van ride. And then we finished the song back in our... I'm trying to think where we were living right now at that time. But wherever it was, we finished the rest of the song there. But it was a magic moment where the whole band very naturally collaborated without any sort of outside kind of pressure or without anybody trying to get involved in what we were doing. Because as you get bigger down the line, there's always people sort of stepping in, trying to have some influence on what you're doing. So this was a very sort of pure and innocent moment, you know, that I feel like was recorded in that song.
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Paradise City Empty Re: Paradise City

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