Think About You

This hard rock track has one detail that makes it special: the guitar solo isn’t played by Slash, but by Izzy Stradlin, one of the band’s original songwriters. It’s unusual for a member of the original lineup—who is also typically the rhythm guitarist—to take on that role in such a well-known song. The main melody, with its blend of ballad and catchy riff, is built on an acoustic foundation that later expands with distortion—something that wasn’t the norm in American hard rock in 1987. The lyrics, simple yet effective, play on the repetition of direct advice, as if the narrator were trying to convince someone—or himself—to pay attention to what really matters.

It was born almost at the same time as the band. Stradlin wrote it in the first few months after the group formed, when members such as Tracii Guns, Ole Beich, and Rob Gardner were still in the lineup. It was performed at nearly every show in 1985 and 1986, before the album *Appetite for Destruction* was released in July 1987. Recorded between January and June of that year in the United States, with Mike Clink as producer and Michael Barbiero and Steve Thompson handling the mix, the song runs exactly 3:52. Interestingly, it wasn’t part of the band’s most famous tours, such as the Appetite for Destruction Tour or the Use Your Illusion Tour, but it returned to the setlist years later during the Chinese Democracy Tour, where Stradlin would sometimes join the band on stage to perform it with them.