Sweet Child O' Mine

She was wrapped in one of those hospital blankets—white with the blue and pink stripes, the ones every hospital in America seems to have bought from the same catalog in 1974. Three hours old. Eyes closed. Making sounds that weren’t quite crying, weren’t quite anything.

I had my phone out. Tiny speaker. Slash’s opening riff filling a room that smelled like antiseptic and exhaustion and something new.

My wife looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had.

“She’s got eyes of the bluest skies, as if they thought of rain.”

I don’t know why this song. I don’t know why it had to be the first thing she heard outside the womb. But I’d thought about it for months—what song do you play for a brand new person? What do you want their ears to learn first about the world?

Something true. Something that sounds like love feels. Something that starts gentle and builds into chaos because that’s what life is.

Slash wrote that riff as a joke. A finger exercise. Axl heard it from another room and said keep playing. The most recognizable guitar intro of the eighties, maybe ever, was an accident.

Axl wrote the words for Erin Everly. He was scared of how much he loved her. You can hear it—the way his voice cracks when he asks where we go from here. He didn’t know. He was terrified. He wrote about it anyway.

My daughter’s sixteen now. She thinks GN’R is “dad music.” She’s not wrong. She doesn’t remember that hospital room, doesn’t know she came into the world to the sound of that riff.

But I do.

Where do we go now? Anywhere. Everywhere. Wherever she wants. I’m just glad I got to be there at the beginning, watching her sleep through a love song written by a guy who was scared of the same thing I was.

How much it was possible to feel.