Paradise City
Axl
"The verses are more about being in the jungle; the chorus is like being back in the Midwest or somewhere. It reminds me of when I was a little kid and just looked up at the blue sky and went "Wow, what is all that, it's so big out there." Everything was more innocent. There are parts of the song that have more of a down home feel. And when I started putting the overlayers on the vocals (I put five tracks on there), it seemed that it came out like some Irish or Scottish heritage. One of the weird things is I had a feeling it would go over good in Europe. The kids there sang Brownstone, they sang It's So Easy, Mama Kin, and these other songs that they'd heard on the EP. They also sang Paradise City and they'd never heard it!"
[An Interview With The Gunners, Hit Parader - March 1988]

"'Paradise City' is more about me and the streets. Duff wrote the first part of the chorus, Izzy wrote the second part, and Slash wrote the melody of the last half of the chorus..."
[Nussbaum (1988) Soft As A Petal/Sharp As A Thorn, Rock Scene - April 1988]

Duff
"The chords to that song I wrote when I first moved to L.A., when I didn't know me anybody and was kinda feeling a little down. So that kinda came out, like reaching for something, you know?"
[An Interview With The Gunners, Hit Parader - March 1988]

Slash
"We were in the van, coming back from San Fransisco to L.A., and we just started playing the basic chords - it was on accoustic at the time. Then we got into this 'Take me down to the paradise city, where the girls are fat and they got big titties' thing. I think initially it started out with 'the grass is green,' and I thought, 'That's lame!' But we ended up keeping the 'grass is green' thing. The 'big titty' thing was just my own problem."
[Turner (2001) 10 Rockin' Riffs From Appetite, Lies, Use Your Illusion I-II, Guitar One - June 2001]