10 Best Acoustic Hard Rock Songs

10. Hard Luck Woman - KISS

After the raving success of the band's live album Alive!, KISS were suddenly on the fast track to rock and roll stardom. The band doubled down on the bombast with their next album Destroyer before settling into a groove of writing a more hard-hitting form of the standard rock and roll format.

As the band started selecting songs for the album Rock and Roll Over, Paul Stanley had written a song that he thought would be suited to Rod Stewart. Once the band heard it on Stanley's original demo, the tune quickly went into the collective KISS mind, with the band breaking out the acoustic material and playing a more straightforward ballad. Given his vocal timbre, drummer Peter Criss was called upon to sing the song because of his raspy voice, which sounded the closest to Stewart's vocal style.

Rather than pulling from the rock and roll well of songwriting topics like freedom, drinking, and partying, this song is a breezy tale about the daughter of a sailors who has fallen on hard times. The slice-of-life vocal delivered with a man in full rock makeup was something unusual yet incredibly endearing for the time. A lowlight in the band's discography that shows their artistic flexibility beyond power chord ragers.