In mid-1998, Youth, who had produced U2 and the Verve, was brought in. Youth felt that Rose was not ready to record a new album: "He kind of pulled out ... He was quite isolated. There weren't very many people I think he could trust. It was very difficult to penetrate the walls he'd built up." Frustrated, Youth left the project. Rose later told "USA Today" he had stopped writing for years in the mid-1990s because of criticism from Slash and McKagan and his ex-fiancée Stephanie Seymour.