“Beth” by Kiss

"Beth" is the soft underbelly of Destroyer, Kiss's fourth studio album, from 1976: no thunder, no crunch, just Peter Criss singing over a grand piano. It began life as "Beck", a demo Criss and his friend Stan Penridge had written back in their days in a band called Chelsea. Criss played it for producer Bob Ezrin during the Destroyer sessions, and Ezrin reshaped it, renamed it and sat at the piano himself, with Dick Wagner on acoustic guitar.

Casablanca first tucked it onto the flip side of "Detroit Rock City", but listeners flipped the record over, and a month later it was an A-side of its own. It became the band's biggest US hit, reaching 7 on the Hot 100, went gold and won a People's Choice Award in 1977. On stage Criss usually sang it to a backing track.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.