The album Robert Plant thought revived his career: “A reboot for me”
Every legacy act usually has to deal with falling out of favour with the public at least once in their lives. No one can be the new hip thing forever, and there’s bound to be a bunch of snot-nosed musicians who will make them look like old men when they start making their own classics. But Robert Plant was always open to trying new things whenever he made a leap in his solo career, and when he teamed up with Allison Krauss for Raising Sand, he felt like his career was getting resurrected.
Then again, there’s a bit too much of a layer of cool put around any member of Led Zeppelin for them to be considered yesterday’s news. Sure, their careers may have taken a few hits, but hardly anything has made them look any less like towering gods among men whenever their classics came on the radio.
But ‘Percy’ wasn’t interested in playing up his golden god figure forever. He had grown into a seasoned bluesman by the end of their tenure, and it was time for him to move on to more adventurous sounds, either through reforming The Band of Joy or making career highlights on albums like Now and Zen.
While it took Page a little time to adapt to life outside Led Zeppelin with The Firm, teaming up with Plant again in the 1990s became both a blessing and a curse. Nothing’s wrong with returning to one’s roots, but when playing those shows, most people were showing up just so they could get just a little whiff of Zeppelin that they never got to see for themselves.
For all of the people who loved his persona, Plant knew that he didn’t want to be that frontman forever. After all, he had more facets to his playing, and for him, the greatest place to go was the exact opposite of his strengths. He may have had the occasional acoustic song with Zeppelin and could sing beautifully on tracks like ‘The Rain Song’, but getting thrown into the ringer with a bluegrass singer like Krauss was bound to put him through his paces.
And while there is the occasional line that jumps out as recognisably Zeppelin-esque, Plant ended up fitting right into that style, either matching Krauss in harmony on ‘Gone Gone Gone’ or taking a solo vocal that was bound to throw him for a loop. But this wasn’t just a fun experiment for Plant; this was a reintroduction to the world.
When talking about the album later for Mojo, Plant cited Raising Sand as the album that gave his career a shot in the arm, saying, “It was a leap out of my comfort zone, and I went down there with nothing to lose. Doing Raising Sand was definitely such a reboot for me, such a Big Bang of marvel.”
As much as Plant was comfortable in his own skin as an innovative rock god, that didn’t mean he couldn’t still please his old fans, eventually reforming Zeppelin for a few one-off shows in England in 2007. Whereas most people wonder if their golden god will ever want to break out the Zeppelin tunes again, it’s not like his new material doesn’t have its fair share of highlights.
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