The new
GUNS N' ROSES song
"Better" has been receiving airplay across the country, but there is no official single release. No one seems to know where the song came from or how it got out. Did
GUNS N’ ROSES purposely leak the track?
"Here's what I know," keyboardist
Dizzy Reed explains to
GunsNRoses.com. "We were doing a commercial with
Harley-Davidson. Harley was going to do a version using
'Paradise City' and another version using
'Better'. Their web site even had a version up for like one day with
'Better', but the version of
'Better' that they had was an unfinished, unapproved demo. That's why it was removed. The version that's getting airplay is that same demo.
"Our understanding of how that happened is that an experimental edit using
'Better' in place of
'Paradise City' was somehow accidentally mislabeled as the
'Paradise City' Harley-Davidson video/commercial and was inadvertently released on the Internet. We believe the 'leak' came from this source tape and someone with access to it.
"For the record, absolutely none of the songs that have been leaked have come from the band or our organization. None of the songs that have been leaked are anything more than demo versions, works in progress. No final mixes.
"It's really frustrating working on something as hard as we have and then having it wind up on the Internet before it’s finished. Hearing a demo on the radio really sucks."
To see a copy of the letter the Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota radio station
93X Rocks (
KXXR-FM) received from
Axl Rose's attorneys demanding that they "cease and desist" from any further broadcast of
"Better" or any song from
"Chinese Democracy" until such time that such broadcast is authorized, click
here.