Guns N' Roses guitarist Richard Fortus was asked in a new interview with Forbes about both the chances of hearing new music in the band's live show later this year as well as new recordings. Fortus responded, “We love bringing new songs in. We always rehearse stuff up. It's just a matter of everyone sort of feeling comfortable to integrate it into the show. I hope that we have new music out this coming year.”
Fortus also spoke about playing songs in concert that have rarely been aired live in the past, saying, “Over my tenure in the band, which is now stretching to 18 years, there have been a bunch of songs we've rehearsed that we haven't done live. One I wish that we would, I really love the song, is 'Perfect Crime.' I've played that with this band for years and we've just never played it live for whatever reason.”
Guns N' Roses, now nearly four years into a reunion of founding members Axl Rose, Slash and Duff McKagan, will hit the road again in 2020, playing South America in March and hitting the European festival circuit during the late spring and summer.
Ever since the “Not In This Lifetime” trek began in April 2016, rumors have been circulating that new music from the band — the first to feature Axl, Slash and Duff since 1993 — was in the works.
Slash told us that the band had yet to begin writing new music in earnest: “There's, you know, bits and pieces of things and whatnot, but I mean, to really focus on it in earnest as this group that just got together a couple of years ago, we haven't really done that much with it yet.”
The last album to carry the Guns N' Roses name, Chinese Democracy, came out in 2008 and featured Axl Rose as the only original member on the LP.