10 Rock Songs That Don't Sound Like The Artists Who Made Them

10. Swing Life Away - Rise Against

Every hardcore band has that one super chill song that seems to run contrary to everything they're about, but few of these anomalies have gone quite as far as Rise Against's Swing Life Away.

An acoustic ballad, Swing Life Away speaks of optimism in the face of everyday adversity, and makes Rise Against sound like an acoustic indie outfit. Arriving in 2003 on the Punk Goes Acoustic compilation album, it is unclear whether the band ever intended for this particular track to go any further, but at the insistence of their record label, it was expanded upon and included in their 2004 album Siren Song of the Counter Culture.

Ironically, Swing Life Away ended up being the runaway hit from the otherwise hardcore album, and netted the Chicago teetotallers a whole raft of new fans -- fans who couldn't have been more surprised when the rest of the album shook their Badly Drawn Boy posters off the wall. While in recent years Rise Against have tacked closer to the mainstream, picking up the acoustic again from time to time, Swing Life Away still stands out as an oddity in their discography.