The Led Zeppelin songs Robert Plant called their “finest moments”
Led Zeppelin stand at the top of the rock mountain. Of course, many bands have excelled beyond what Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham created, but there will never be another rock band as wholly influential as the British quartet. Their position now is anointed by God and unlikely to ever slip from grace.
With such prestige, there is a high chance that every single member of their still-growing fanbase has a different song or album that they consider to be the group’s pinnacle. When a band has reached such heights, the shadow they cast is larger than most, meaning every listener can find something unique or appealing to them. It’s one of the great facets of life that you can fall in love with a tune only for another listener to think of it as something close to worthless, and vice versa.
This endless dance is enjoyable for musos, who pretend not to feel enlivened by the spirited debate one has about what piece of art is ostensibly better than another. However, rather than arbitrarily using one’s own opinion, when you next find yourself locked in a table-top tussle with a friend about the virtues of Led Zeppelin, why not lean on Robert Plant himself, who has often shared a selection of his favourite songs from the band.
He even called some of the best moments of Led Zeppelin’s impressive career. “[Kashmir’], ‘All My Love’ and ‘In the Light’,” Robert Plant told Rolling Stone, “And two or three others really were the finest moments.”
It’s an impressive collection of songs to put forward as Led Zeppelin at their finest. Plant has often effused about ‘Kashmir’ as a “perfect” song and the one track he wants Led Zeppelin to be remembered for. There may have been fine moments, but nothing was quite like the eastern-influenced number: “‘Kashmir’ in particular. It was so positive, lyrically. It’s the quest, the travels and explorations that Page and I went on to far climes well off the beaten track… That, really, to me, is the Zeppelin feel.”
‘All My Love’ is a more personal track for Plant, written for his son Karac, who tragically died from a stomach virus in 1977. “It was just paying tribute to the joy that [Karac] gave us as a family and, in a crazy way, still does occasionally,” Plant said of the song in 2018. What perhaps most curious is trying to figure out which tunes form the band’s discography Plant includes within the “two or three others”?
However, thanks to a conversation he had with John Bonham‘s son, Jason, we may have a clue, as the drummer shared: “His favourite was… ‘Tea for One,’ he still loves, and ‘Achilles Last Stand.’ He said, ‘If I ever play somebody something from Led Zeppelin… This is it. Listen to this. This is what we had.’ He’s very proud of that. So that was a wonderful thing to have.”
So, if you ever find yourself stuck in the middle of an argument about the work of Led Zeppelin that seems to be going nowhere and needs the nuclear weapon of opinion to try and derail the raging war, then look no further than Plant’s own list of the band’s greatest moments.
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