Guns N’ Roses Soar On Charts Due To ‘Thor’ Placements
Both ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ and ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ appear in the film.
Guns N’ Roses are back on the Billboard charts dated July 23 because songs from the group’s catalog had syncs placed in the film Thor: Love and Thunder, which opened in theaters July 8 and has since topped the box office.
“Sweet Child O’ Mine” and “Welcome to the Jungle” landed on the Hot Hard Rock Songs chart at Nos.2 and 3. They also landed at Nos.7 and 13 on Hot Rock Songs and Nos.10 and 17 on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs.
This isn’t the first time that “Sweet Child O’ Mine” has landed in the charts of late. The song appeared in the trailer for Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder. It reached No.1 on Billboard’s Hot Hard Rock Songs chart on April 27, almost 35 years after its release. The third single off Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 debut, Appetite for Destruction, the song originally topped the Billboard Hot 100 in the fall of 1988.
“Sweet Child O’ Mine” was written during a jam session that Guns N’ Roses held on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip. Guitarist Slash had been experimenting with different melodies, and the rest of the members built the song around that. “Writing and rehearsing it to make it a complete song was like pulling teeth,” Slash told Q Magazine in 2005. “For me, at the time, it was a very sappy ballad.” Frontman Axl Rose added the lyrics, which were based on his then-girlfriend, model Erin Everly (who also appeared in the song’s iconic video).
In October 2019, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” became the first music video of the 80s to earn over a billion views on YouTube. Last August, the hit also surpassed a billion streams on Spotify.
After taking a break from the studio, Guns N’ Roses have returned with new material. In February, they dropped Hard Skool, a four-song collection that featured their two most recent singles: “Hard Skool” and “Absurd.”
