The album Robert Plant thought didn’t hold up: “A lot of the songs got lost in the technology”
When an artist completes a record, the last thing they want to do is go back and listen to what they’ve just created. They spent so much time bringing it to life that revisiting the work to judge it critically can be one of the most painful processes they endure. Even when everything seems to work out, it doesn’t always feel that way to them. Robert Plant admitted as much when discussing Now and Zen.
For the first few years of his solo career, it looked as though Plant was going to be living in the shadow of his ‘Golden God’ reputation for the rest of his life. He was far more content on living life without the rest of his hard rock brethren, and given how he circled back around to reforming the Band of Joy in his later years, he seemed more content to just make the music he wanted to make instead of trying to match the success of his last band.
For any casual Zeppelin fan, though, Now and Zen may have one of the few Zeppelin solo outings that could match some of their weaker efforts. While the album is far from the level of Physical Graffiti or even Houses of the Holy, Plant’s willingness to change with the times gave us the closest thing we would get to a 1980s version of Zeppelin, complete with blues inflexions every now and then.
Although many of Plant’s finest moments appear on the album, he felt that it could have benefited from easing back on the production a little bit, later telling Uncut, “By the time Now and Zen came out in ’88, it looked like I was big again. It was a Top 10 album on both sides of the Atlantic. But if I listen to it now, I can hear that a lot of the songs got lost in the technology of the time.”
Granted, some of the “technology” in question that Plant is talking about is practically analogue equipment compared to what people are working with today. Yes, there are more than a few synthesisers and they could have been dialled back a bit, but there’s still a great opportunity for the band to flex their chops a bit in between everything.
If anything, maybe that cluttered production helped Plant in a way when it came time to work his way into the 1990s. Given how he wanted to run away from that kind of sound, hearing him return to Jimmy Page for a duo album was the kind of musical marriage that everyone had been clamouring for.
It wasn’t nearly the same as Zeppelin, but it at least had the makings of something great, especially when they locked in on those old blues standards again. The Zeppelin nostalgia seemed all the sweeter once Page and Plant got together, and if you Percy never cared for it, that’s probably down to him making Now and Zen such an overpolished experience.
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