November Rain

Axl Rose wrote “November Rain” alone, reportedly over most of a decade, before Guns N' Roses finally recorded it for 1991's Use Your Illusion I — he's cited Elton John's piano ballads, especially “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” as a direct influence. At just under nine minutes, it's one of the longest songs to ever reach the Billboard Hot 100, and its music video, drawn from a Del James short story, was one of the most expensive ever made.

It's also a rare case of a hard-rock band leading with a piano part instead of a guitar riff — Slash's now-famous solos don't show up until well after the piano has already carried the entire song on its own.

This chart is written in C major, but Guns N' Roses tune their guitars down a half-step, so the actual recording sounds in B major. That works fine for a guitarist — the same finger shapes just ring out a half-step lower once the strings are detuned. A piano can't do that: there's no “detune” option, so whatever key you physically play is the key you actually hear. If you want your piano to match the record's exact pitch, you'd need to transpose this chart down into B major; playing it as written in C gives you the same chords and feel, just a half-step brighter than the album.

This is the longest, most demanding piece in this collection, and it's easier to learn as a sequence of sections than as one continuous read-through: the opening verse and pre-chorus, the first chorus, a quieter middle section, the extended guitar-solo interlude, and the dramatic minor-key outro each have their own chord vocabulary and feel. Get each section solid on its own — including the trickier Dm9 and Csus4 voicings in the verse — before trying to connect them at tempo.