Watch Carrie Underwood and Axl Rose Turn Stagecoach Festival Into Paradise City With Two Guns N’ Roses Songs

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticWhen Carrie Underwood’s band broke into the opening strains of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” at the Stagecoach Festival Saturday, it seemed like business as usual.

The country superstar’s Guns N’ Roses fangirl-ism is well known, and she’s incorporated GNR numbers into her set on a regular basis before, even showing an aptitude for appropriating Axl Rose’s snaky frontman moves as her own.

But within a few bars, she let loose the closely held secret that, tonight, paradise would be a shared experience. “Welcome to the greatest night of my life,” Underwood shouted. “Give it up for Axl Rose!”Her rock god wasn’t limiting himself to just one song.

The telltale lack of a hug at the end of “Sweet Child” was a tipoff that more was on the way. “Did you think we were through?” Underwood bellowed, as her band then broke into a potent and letter-perfect arrangement of the GNR number she’s sung even more often on the road, “Paradise City.” And then that was it — no reciprocal Rose-co-fronted version of “Jesus, Take the Wheel” or “How Great Thou Art,” unfortunately, to name two Underwood setlist staples that had already occurred earlier in the set. “I can’t believe we thought we should have more songs after this,” quipped Underwood, after Rose left the stage and she was left to close out her headlining sets with three more solo numbers packed with a little less gunpowder.Underwood may have been speaking only a bit hyperbolically when she made a greatest-night claim: Her history with “Paradise City” goes back far enough that it’s on record that she performed the song when she headlined Stagecoach all the way back in 2008.Underwood was coming off a residency at Resorts World Las Vegas that.