"Sweet Child O' Mine" was written in a total of five minutes. Slash and Izzy Stradlin were just having a jam session, tooling around on their respective instruments while singer Axl Rose was upstairs playing with his action figures or something. Slash started doing his string skipping exercise and thought it sounded kind of like circus music, so he kept playing it and making goofy faces at his bandmate. Rose, on the other hand, heard the riff and came downstairs to tell Slash that it was going to be their next song.

It took a while for Slash to begrudgingly get the unusual riff to match with a drum beat, but they eventually started recording. Their producer listened to what they'd put together so far and told them that they should add a dramatic breakdown in place of the last verse, with Slash busting out a killer solo and Rose singing something. After thinking for a moment about what that something could be, Axl asked "Where do we go now?" As in, "Where do we go with this song?"

Nobody had any better suggestions, so for a solid chunk of the song, Rose just keeps shouting, "Where do we go now?"

It could have just as easily been any other sentence someone decided to say at that particular moment, like "Where are my cigarettes?" or "Why does Slash's hat smell so bad?"