[About covering “Live and Let Die”] I thought about it once a long time ago but just thought you would never be able to get that the way it sounds, that well. […] And then I ran at the movie [The James Bond movie Live and Let Die], I was watching it, and this song comes and it’s like “Welcome to the Jungle 2.” […] And it just felt right so we ended up playing it a little bit, in rehearsal, and it started working, and now we’ve actually gone and start recording it and finding out that ‘Wait, we are good enough to play this song.’ We didn’t think we were. We didn’t think we were good enough to get it done right, but Slash is doing most of the string arrangements on guitar with a harmonizer. To me it’s like Tom Waits meets Metallica, it’s the way I sing it, so rough and scratchy, like I sound like Tom Waits. It’s working out really good, it sounds like us. Everybody who hears it thinks that it sounds like the perfect song for us.

—Axl Rose, MTV

It’s one of those songs, like “Heaven’s Door,” that Axl and I have always loved. It’s always been a really heavy song, but we’d never discussed it and didn’t know that we each liked it. We were talking one night about a cover song and that came up, and we’re like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it!’ So I went to rehearsal with Izzy and Matt and Duff, just to see whether we could sound good playing it, and it sounded really heavy. It’s actually heavier when we play it live than it is on the record, because of the horns and synthesizer. Live it’s got more bottom to it.

—Slash, Guitar