Appearing on Use Your Illusion I, the longest Guns N' Roses song (so far) is the 10 minutes, 14 seconds long chorus-less “Coma”. Lyrically, the song is one of their heaviest, taking about the effects of self-destruction, being suspended deep in a coma and considering suicide.

Some say “Coma” reflects substance abuse as a means of escaping reality and Axl Rose’s struggle to understand himself. Rose has been known to have attended therapy to help him understand the root of his frustration and destructiveness.

In his autobiography, Slash states that he initially wrote the guitar parts while in a “heroin delirium” following the Appetite For Destruction tour. Axl had trouble fitting lyrics to it. In 1992, Axl Rose told Interview magazine:

I tried to write that song for a year, and couldn’t. I went to write it at the studio and passed out. I woke up two hours later and sat down and wrote the whole end of the song, like, just off the top of my head. It was like, don’t even know what’s coming out, man, but it’s coming. I think one of the best things that I’ve ever written was maybe the end segment of the song “Coma”. It just poured out.

When interviewed by Kurt Loder for MTV’s Famous Last Words, Axl described the situation behind the lyrics:

There’s a song called “Coma” that’s like 11 minutes 45 seconds long with no chorus. And I think there was only one verse that somewhere it repeats itself. It’s Slash’s baby. It’s his monster. The song used to be called Girth. But I started writing about when I OD'ed 4 years ago. The reason I OD’d was because of stress. I couldn’t take it. And I just grabbed the bottle of pills in an argument and just gulped them down and I ended up in the hospital. But I liked that I wasn’t in the fight anymore and I was fully conscious that I was leaving. I liked that. But then I go, all of a sudden, my first real thoughts were that “okay, you haven’t toured enough. The record’s not going to last; it’s going to be forgotten. This and that, you have work to do. Get out of this.” And I went “No!” and I woke up, you know, and pulled myself out of it. But in the describing of that, some people could take it wrong and think this means “go put yourself into a coma,” you know. And so it’s really tricky, and I’m still playing with the words to figure out how to, like, show some hope in there.