Slash has revealed he tried to persuade Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose to soften the lyrics to their 1987 track "My Michelle," believing they were too harsh towards the woman who inspired the song. The track, from the band's debut album Appetite for Destruction, was written about Michelle Young, a friend of the group, after she jokingly said she wished someone would write a romantic song about her like Elton John's "Your Song." Rose initially drafted tender lyrics but abandoned them in favour of a starkly honest account of Young's difficult upbringing, fitting the album's raw, unvarnished tone.

The finished lyrics referenced Young's troubled family life and drug addiction, including lines about her father's work in pornography and her mother's heroin use. Slash, who had known Young since he was 13 or 14 and understood how hard her life had been, said he warned Rose the words were "so realistic, so upfront… and so cruel" that they risked crushing her, though the band ultimately kept the lyrics largely as written.