Guns N’ Roses Surprising “The General” New Song Details Revealed

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Former Guns N’ Roses drummer Bryan Mantia, better known by his stage name Brain, was recently interviewed by the Guns N’ Roses fan podcast Appetite For Distortion. Brain discussed the making of Guns N’ Roses songs “The General” and “Seven” which are rumored to be in consideration to be reworked on the band’s new album, as numerous sources have stated that unreleased Chinese Democracy material is being worked on by Axl Rose. A low quality instrumental of “The General” leaked last year online. Alternative Nation reporter Mike Mazzarone transcribed Brain’s comments leaking details about the songs.

Brain: It’s funny because how ‘The General’ came about was we were supposed to, you know, this was like building up to that show. Everybody was like “Hey if anybody has songs or shit you can bring them in. So that song, ‘The General’ was a song that from when [inaudible] and [inaudible] and I, when I wasn’t doing Guns stuff would just jam in my living room type of thing. I had a pro tool setup, we were jamming, we were trying to come up with songs for Guns and we had this song called, well we called it ‘The General’ because we were eating general’s chicken. Yet, when I turned it in to Axl [Rose] he thought it was called ‘The General’ because I was making fun of Tommy [Stinson] and Tommy was kind of the band MD, he was the musical director when we would have rehearsals and Axl thought i was kind of poking fun at Tommy like a general. Like sort of a ‘hey we’re rehearsing at this time’ and that kind of shit. I was like ‘no dude, it’s because we ate general’s chicken.

[Brando laughs]

Brain: Yeah, it’s funny because you said ‘The General’ and it all comes back around because we were writing all these songs to try and turn in. Xtract is sort of this old school DJ type, he’s a bass player but he loves old school break beats and you know, cratedigger type of guy. So, the shit we were putting together was crazy. We were going ‘OK what sample should we find for Axl? Well he’s sort of like Julius Ceasar’ so we were trying to sample stuff that reflected that. We were looking for old school, crazy shit and I think we sampled Ben-Hur, chopped it up, cut it up and that became a jam, I think we called it ‘Seven’.

Listen to “Ep. 110 – Brain returns to talk Chinese Democracy, new music, and tennis” on Spreaker.