10 Greatest Unplugged Albums In Rock History

Part of the beauty behind rock and roll is getting to plug your guitar into an amplifier and let it rip. Even if you've never touched a guitar in your life, there's something about putting together some distortion that will send an instant chill up your spine. That's just to get you started though. The real artists don't need the distortion to melt your heart.

Rather than just plug into their amps, almost all of the albums on this list are entirely made using acoustic instruments. This isn't the kind of country stuff that we're looking at here either. With no musical mask to hide behind here, the performance is carried on the power of the songs in this case, with most of them holding up as stunning pieces of art even without all of the added extensions. In that respect, you get to see these artists less as the rock gods that you know them to be and more as people, combing through their back catalog to see what really makes them tick.

Hell, some of these are so raw that you'll wonder why these people would write something this close to the bone to begin with. That's the beauty of the true rock and rollers: having absolutely no fear what people think of you.

As soon as the grunge wave hit the airwaves, there didn't seem to be any more rules in rock music. The minute that Nirvana hit it big with Smells Like Teen Spirit, the entire landscape seemed to shift, leaving the rest of the rock world clamoring for a copycat. And while there were no shortage of people willing to ride the coattails of grunge, Days of the New found their way to the top by making their version of angst a lot more primal.

Working with only an acoustic guitar, Travis Meeks remains one of the most enigmatic songwriters of the late '90s, with tracks that sat somewhere between the sounds of Pearl Jam while also having a metallic edge to the whole thing. Outside of the breakout single Touch Peel and Stand, the rest of the album has that same type of moody aura, including the longer cuts like Where I Stand where the music seems to be floating on air.

In fact, most of this album tends to feel that way, almost like you're being placed into an alternate dimension where the music plays out your emotions in real time. It's not always the most wholesome of messages every time, but this is the kind of post grunge outfit that had the one X-factor that was impossible to duplicate: heart.