The artist Robert Plant “couldn’t imagine” singing like
There’s no accurate way of teaching what Robert Plant could do whenever he sang with Led Zeppelin.
There are plenty of artists who have tried to copy his style through the years, but even Jimmy Page hooked up with David Coverdale to make an album in the early 1990s, it was clearly a poor man’s attempt to sound like Zeppelin, even if a few of the tunes showed glimpses of what Page had done back in the day. No one can truly copy what Plant did back then, but he felt that there were more singers who went miles above anything that he was doing, even when working on his masterpieces.
But Plant was never one to be confined to one particular genre. He liked seeing what else was out there whenever he made a new record, and even though there were plenty of artists that tried their best to make the best music that they could under the rock and roll banner, half of Zeppelin’s discography was about taking new risks, whether that was making world music on ‘Kashmir’ or stretching their songs out to epic lengths like on ‘Achilles Last Stand’.
When Plant first released his solo records, though, he didn’t want everything to be a rehash of what Zeppelin did. He had to go back to his roots in many respects, and while there are more than a few songs in his catalogue that seem like they come directly from his days in The Band of Joy, he wasn’t yet done exploring what the world music angle had to offer whenever he ventured outside of his wheelhouse.
The biggest names in Western music were still fantastic, but Plant figured that he could learn a lot from those who didn’t have the same blues influences that he grew up with. That music seemed to come from another planet entirely, and when looking at someone like Oum Kalsoum, when he first heard her on a visit to Marrakesh in the 1970s.
He had already become one of the biggest names in music by this time, but if he was going to truly impress someone like Kalsoum, he was going to have his work cut out for him, saying, “I was intrigued by the scales, initially, and obviously the vocal work. The way she sang, the way she could hold a note, you could feel the tension, you could tell that everybody, the whole orchestra, would hold a note until she wanted to change.”
Adding, “When I first heard the way she would dance down through the scale to land on a beautiful note that I couldn’t even imagine singing, it was huge: somebody had blown a hole in the wall of my understanding of vocals.”
In fact, his exposure to this kind of music doesn’t sound all that different from what George Harrison experienced when working with Ravi Shankar for the first time. He had started seeing the merit in music from other cultures, but even if people didn’t understand it yet, Plant was going to try to find a way for people to truly comprehend the beauty that they were missing out on every single time they sang.
Granted, not everyone was really ready for Plant to start taking those same chances, but he was never going to try to compete with what that kind of Egyptian music could do. He could only bring his experience to every song he sang, but even when the tune wasn’t completely indebted to other cultures, you could hear him putting his own spin on it or at least giving a tip of the hat to those that gave him that same kind of rush that he got from listening to that kind of music.
His more recent work with people like Alison Krauss is far more indebted to Americana, but that doesn’t mean that Plant has completely forgotten about his favourite singers, either. If anything, Kalsoum is only further proof that there is still a way for him to push himself that doesn’t involve him making the same kind of leaps that he did in ‘Immigrant Song’.
