The 1970 song Robert Plant called “one of the greatest”
When Led Zeppelin broke up, the last thing Robert Plant wanted to do was make another heavy rock album.
He had done that part of his career already, and even if he could have made a fortune trying to stretch his voice like he used to do, it was never going to work as long as he had the rest of his mates with him. So with John Bonham long gone and everyone else going off to do their own solo projects, Plant’s only choice was to become a completely different musician than the one he had been for so long.
He didn’t need to be the one screaming to the rafters anymore, but there were also more than a few moments where his ideas didn’t exactly come together. The idea of him becoming a new wave artist was only going to come off as unintentionally funny, and while embracing a bit more electronic elements wasn’t the worst idea in the world, there was no use in him trying to sample other songs when everyone else was sampling Zeppelin joints.
But if he didn’t need to play rock and roll anymore, folk music was always the next best thing. He had already been known for taking things down a notch in some of Zeppelin’s greatest work, so why not try his hand at making something a bit more downtempo? He didn’t have to stretch his voice as much as he used to at the time, but he realised that he did have his work cut out for him when he was stepping into someone’s musical shoes.
Not every one of Zeppelin’s acoustic tunes was easy to sing, and even when Plant was trying something new with Jimmy Page in the 1990s, he was still trying to show songs like ‘When the Levee Breaks’ in a much different light whenever he performed them. When he did try covering some folk legends, though, there was a bit of trepidation that came with interpreting Tim Buckley’s work.
While Buckley had been immortalised for a lot of his songs back in the day, it’s not like he was ever the household name that someone like Bob Dylan was. He was still on his way to becoming a legend when he passed away, and while his son Jeff was doing more than his fair share of Zeppelin worship in the 1990s, Plant figured that he could try his hand at figuring out what made Tim’s folk tunes so great.
And when listening to ‘Song to A Siren’ for the first time, Plant never realised what kind of genius that he was working with when he eventually sang it, saying, “I just think that the whole plan and artistic motif of the lyric and the whole idea of some of the more nebulous but interesting aspects of my life relate to that. It’s one of the greatest, most amazing songs, I think, lyrically. The whole movement of the thing is beautiful.”
Given where he would be going later in his career, though, Plant may have been prepping himself for working on his later projects without even knowing it. No one can just claim that they can hold their own next to someone like Alison Krauss, but when listening to Raising Sand, a lot of the vocal leaps Plant was taking on that record all came down to the way that he was inhabiting songs like this only a few years before.
So when he eventually did inhabit those old Zeppelin songs in 2007, there was a much different singer at the front than there was back in 1977. Plant had put his pipes through the wringer more than a few times, but he felt that the best way to deliver any tune was to internalise every word he was singing, just like he did when he was listening to Buckley’s immortal words.
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