Country music star Carrie Underwood has long professed her love for Guns N’ Roses. She told Jimmy Fallon during a “Tonight Show” appearance in 2020 that one of her favorite concerts of all time was seeing the recent, reformed GNR lineup that includes guitarist Slash and bassist Duff McKagen alongside legendary singer Axl Rose. “We were nowhere near Las Vegas, so naturally I said, ‘Let’s go to Las Vegas with the band and go see GN’R play,'” Underwood told Fallon. “It’s kind of a life-long dream of mine I never thought would happen. Couldn’t waste that opportunity, so I abandoned my husband, abandoned my children, went to Vegas, and saw Guns N’ Roses. Amazing. Usually, when I go to concerts, I’m like, in a box on the side, which is great — it has its perks, there’s usually a bathroom in there, it’s kind of awesome,” she explained. “But you miss the energy of the crowd. Because we were in Vegas, we were just in there with everyone else, it was absolutely incredible. You could feel everybody, everybody was screamin’, I was screamin’ — I was, like, ‘I’m never gonna see none of these people ever again, I’m gonna act like a fool!. It was amazing. It’s hard when you meet your heroes, you know, because I do consider [Axl] to be somebody who taught me how to sing,” Underwood told Fallon. “And I was like, ‘What if I meet him and he’s not everything I want him to be?’ But he was, he was super cool and nice.”
Underwood told E! In a 2015 interview that one of her dreams was to sing with Axl, and on Sunday at the Stagecoach Country music festival in Indio, California, she got her wish as the duo performed “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and “Paradise City.” “Welcome to the greatest night of my life. Give it up for Axl Rose!” she said as Rose joined her starting with the second verse of “Sweet Child O’Mine.” They then launched into “Paradise City” as Underwood told the crowd, “You thought we were finished?”
The country star took to Twitter after the performance saying: “Best. Night. Of. My. Life!!! I am still freaking out!!! Thank you, @axlrose, for making this lifelong dream come true!!! You rocked that @Stagecoach stage harder than anyone has ever rocked it before!” Underwood previously covered “Paradise City” at the CMA Music Festival in Nashville in 2013. Guns N’ Roses is set to tour Europe, South America, Mexico and Australia and New Zealand later this year. Axl shared a few backstage photos of the show on the Guns N’ Roses Twitter account, and he wrote in an accompanying message: “A great Fn night!”
