The Led Zeppelin song that leaves Robert Plant “overwhelmed”
When the members of Led Zeppelin were growing up and first getting interested in music, it was an interesting time in history. The countless documentaries focusing on the band often cover that, setting these musicians against the backdrop of post-war Britain, where the emergence of rock and roll felt like the clouds parting and hope shining down on the country’s youth. Even as the members became adults and became a band, the context they existed in always played a major part in their, and the world’s, relationship to their music – and Robert Plant never forgot that.
Out of all the members, it seemed especially important for Plant. Whereas Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones both grew up around music or at least around London, where access to music and musical jobs was much easier, Plant was raised in the Midlands, the child of a traditional Romani woman and a father who served in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War.
His love for music emerged out of that. His passion is a tapestry for it, of inspiration he gathered back at home throughout those younger years, finding and engaging with as much culture as possible to not only broaden his horizons out of his small-town life, but also to find a place in a world and in a country where people still felt confused and lost in the chasm between wartime and what would come next.
What would come next was the 1960s, the countercultural era that seemed to give people like Robert Plant and countless other young people a sense of purpose. It was the era when his band would begin, when they would find a sound and find major success off the back of it. It’s also an era that history loves to rose tint when, in reality, Robert Plant and his artistry were still the product of context as one war was merely switched for another.
“There was a mood and an air of trying to make it through,” he said about the late 1960s and early 1970s when Led Zeppelin were working. “The world is a different place. Everybody was reeling from Vietnam and the usual extra helping of corruption with politics,” he continued.
Plant certainly had a sense that he should, or wanted to, be attempting to articulate all of this. He tried to engage with the moment he was existing in, but he didn’t quite know how. He explained, “There were people who were really eloquent who brought it home far less pictorially and did a much better job of reaching that point. But I am what I am, and as my grandfather said, ‘I can’t be more ‘am’-erer.’”
But there is one song that still leaves him feeling “overwhelmed” when he hears it, as he hears the attempt to tackle this huge topic into something equally as epic and huge. “When I hear it in isolation, I feel overwhelmed for every single reason you could imagine,” he told Rolling Stone about their 1971 anthem, ‘Stairway To Heaven.’
The question of exactly what the track is about or means has been asked ever since, but to Plant and his bandmates, the answer was simple; “I used to say it in Zeppelin, ‘This is a song of hope.’” Given the monumental era they existed in, an equally epic and monumental song to soundtrack it, ‘Stairway To Heaven’, will forever overwhelm Robert Plant as it sounds just like his youthful desire to say something, do something or at least go some way to capture a historic moment.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Led Zeppelin Newsletter
All the latest stories about Led Zeppelin from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.