The attribute that makes Robert Plant jealous of Bob Dylan’s songwriting
Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant has always admired Bob Dylan, an artist who he views as the ultimate songsmith. As a songwriter, Plant is accomplished, but even he admits it is not his main area of strength and Dylan’s talent in that faculty makes him green with envy.
Only a handful of songwriters can claim to be on a similar level as Dylan, a creative who operates in a different universe from most. Vocally, during his peak, Plant could hit notes that Dylan could never dream of landing, but it’s never been a debate about who is the more gifted songwriter out of the pair.
There was a specific moment when Dylan first found his way into Plant’s life and its impact on how he saw the world. The American offered up an invitation into an exciting new land and filled his song with references to people who’d previously never entered his consciousness.
“Something happened when Dylan arrived. I had to grapple with what he was talking about. His music referenced Woody Guthrie, Richard and Mimi Farina, Reverend Gary Davis, Dave Van Ronk and all these great American artists I knew nothing about,” Plant once told The Guardian. “He was absorbing the details of America and bringing it out without any reservation at all and ignited a social conscience that is spectacular”.
Almost 60 years since Dylan’s popularity explosion, his output still has the same strong emotive effect on Plant. Following Dylan’s release of Rough and Rowdy Ways, the former Led Zeppelin frontman heaped praise upon Dylan on his Digging Deep podcast and explained what makes him an elite songwriter.
During the episode, Plant discusses how he separates music and lyrics during songwriting. When discussing the latter, the singer said: “Whose soul are you really baring? Are you baring your own soul?… Do you go into character, or do you refer to people who you care about who are in trouble? And the song pours out from another angle. That’s quite something.”
Everitt was surprised by this acknowledgement, to which Plant self-deprecatingly replied: “My songwriting’s pretty … it goes in a straight line. The idea of me actually taking on the guise of somebody who’s been in some kind of situation that you can only watch from afar – it’s more than I can even imagine, to voice somebody else’s condition and actually be them in the song.”
Plant moved the conversation onto Rough and Rowdy Ways and discussed how the song is a collection of pieces that features “people who’ve lived a life and they are actually telling it”. On Dylan, Plant believes his peer is “able to – whimsically, almost, I would say – tell us the story of what he sees of himself and how he sees other people”.
A stand-out track from the album for Plant is ‘I Contain Multitudes’, which in his view, is an example of Dylan saying, “‘This is the story of all of our lives! Except he’s taken the bends in a totally different way, the curves.'”
Furthermore, Plant went on to add how Dylan “could probably have written for about a week in that idiom, that way of seeing it all” and called it “tremendous, very moving”, which is “very special writing for now.”
While Plant has crafted an array of tracks that have cemented his place in rock folklore forever, nobody apart from Bob Dylan could pen ‘I Contain Multitudes’.
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