Watch Carrie Underwood Rock Guns N’ Roses Classics With Axl Rose at 2022 Stagecoach Festival
Raise your hand if you saw this coming! Country superstar Carrie Underwood welcomes Guns N' Roses' frontman Axl Rose to the stage Saturday night (April 30) as part of her appearance at the Stagecoach Festival in Indio, California.
Rose joined Underwood for two songs, but his initial appearance onstage came midway into the first song, Underwood's cover of GN'R's "Sweet Child O' Mine." "Give it up for Axl Rose," teased Underwood as Rose joined her after she sang the initial first verse. From that point on, Rose handled a majority of the song, with Underwood chiming in on the "Where do we go now" portion of the track.
While the appearance certainly had the crowd buzzing, Rose then stuck around as Underwood's band started playing "Paradise City." "You thought we were finished?" chided Underwood teasingly, before the two singers traded off lyrics on the GN'R classic.
As Ultimate Classic Rock pointed out, Underwood has professed her love of GN'R publicly, telling Jimmy Fallon in a Tonight Show interview in 2020 that she had experienced one of the best nights of her life catching the current lineup perform after wrapping up one of her own tours. "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."
Fittingly, Underwood offered a bit of foreshadowing to her crowd as GN'R's "Welcome to the Jungle" rang out to the Stagecoach audience just prior to her taking the stage for the night. In total, she played a 21-song set, with Rose's appearance coming late in the evening. Surprisingly after that high, she pulled out her hits "Smoke Break" and "Something in the Water" before heading offstage and returning for the encore "Before He Cheats."
The night also included a moving tribute to country legend Naomi Judd whose death had been revealed earlier in the day. Underwood performed "See You Again" with a choir in tribute.
Watch fan-shot performance of Underwood with Axl Rose at Stagecoach 2022 below.