Robert Plant - Singer - 1976 - Led Zeppelin

Credit: Far Out / Led Zeppelin

The 1969 lyrics Robert Plant didn’t like going back to: “I was willowing”

Mon 27 April 2026 17:30, UK

No one had any kind of expectations for what Led Zeppelin was going to be once Robert Plant joined.

For all he knew, he was making the next generation of The Yardbirds, but even though Jimmy Page had more than his fair share of riffs in his arsenal, a lot of their first records were them figuring out what they wanted to be in real time. There was nothing wrong with that kind of approach, but there were more than a few times when Plant felt that he sold the rest of his band short.

Going through their first record, though, Plant didn’t really need to make too many changes to some of the covers they were doing. A good half of the record was already made easy for him when it came to the lyrics, and all he needed to do was add his booming voice over everything during ‘Dazed and Confused’. But the second album was the first time when it felt like the band really hit a breakthrough.

Their first record was only a heavier version of what bands had been doing for the past few years at that point, and when listening to ‘Whole Lotta Love’, Page defied everyone’s expectations when he stretched the middle section out into some psychedelic trip into darkness. Plant was willing to play along as well, but he was much more comfortable writing about the kind of lyrics that he grew up on rather than making the same kind of bluesy songs about a woman doing him wrong.

JRR Tolkien might not have been on the shelf of every single rock and roll fan, but ‘Ramble On’ did help give some context for where Plant was coming from. He was already used to making music that was more in tune with the hippy movement, but he couldn’t help but think that some of the songs that he wrote with Middle Earth in mind weren’t his best choice when working on Zeppelin tunes.

Page was already used to making songs that sounded larger than life, so Plant felt that they could have used lines that weren’t about Gollum all the time, saying, “My peer group were writing substantial pieces of social commentary, and I was willowing along the Welsh borders thinking about Gollum. I liked what I did, but now I look at it and go, ‘Wooh, that was a bit iffy’.” But those lyrics are what give a lot of those songs character at the end of the day.

No one would have thought to include works of literature in between the heaviest riffs of all time, and after Zeppelin got away with it, it wasn’t hard to see other bands doing the same thing. Sometimes they’d rip them off from Shakespeare, and sometimes there would be people like Paul McCartney making an entire song about Marvel Comics, but all the rest of the music world saw was another tool for artists to work with when making their music.

And it’s not like Plant needed to be defined by the Tolkien worship, either. Other bands could have picked up the mantle and started writing based on whatever books they had been reading, but when you look at the song ‘Kashmir’, Plant was practically doing a more worldly version of what he was talking about on those older songs, only this time with a much more classic Jimmy Page riff behind him.

So while books like The Hobbit certainly gave him a lot of inspiration back in the day, it was only a starting point for where he wanted to go. He knew that there was a lot of power behind Tolkien’s words, and the least that he could do was showcase the genius of what he was reading every single time he went on a journey back down to The Shire.