The one lyric Robert Plant finds difficult to sing: “It’s powerful stuff”
Some songs aren’t meant to be sung forever in rock and roll. While some artists manage to preserve their voices to an almost superhuman degree, the reality is that not every note needs to be sustained for decades to prove a singer’s greatness. Some vocal feats are best left in the past, and Robert Plant knew that some tracks in his arsenal didn’t need to see the stage as often as others.
Right as Plant struck out on his own, though, the last thing he wanted to do was spend his time playing his old Led Zeppelin favourites. His time as the ‘Golden God’ may have been fun, but it was also bound to be messy if all he had to go on was the goodwill from his old group every time he got onstage. So the next best thing was for him to start working on music that was completely alien to him.
While a lot of his first solo albums were well-received by Zeppelin fans, there was always that lingering thought in people’s minds about what songs he was going to play from his old band. Although a tune like ‘Rock and Roll’ might have been to get the crowd going whenever Plant played it, it was too early for him to view himself as a nostalgia act who could only provide a facsimile of what he used to do.
At the same time, it’s not like every one of his songs was lighting the world on fire. Now and Zen was certainly fun, but Shaken N’ Stirred is one of the most perplexing entries in his catalogue, as if he listened to the 1980s period of Talking Heads and figured out that the way forward would be for him to channel his inner David Byrne and come up with something artsy for the hell of it.
When he did end up bringing out some of the old Zeppelin tunes, Plant was shocked at how much he got thrown for a loop. Given his personal taste, there was a slim chance that anyone was going to hear him perform something like ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ but listening back to a song like ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ was enough for him to have pause before singing it in front of a live audience.
During his run of shows in the 1980s, Plant admitted that he found a sense of joy in singing ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ because of how challenging it was, saying, “I feel that power and simplicity, like ‘Misty Mountain Hop.’ The lyrics are so hippie-dippie – “Lots of people sitting on the grass with flowers in their hair/Saying, ‘Hey, boy, do you want to score?’.
“It’s very hard to sing that now, but at the same time, it’s great to sing it. It’s very powerful stuff.”
Robert PLant
Although that vocal is right in his wheelhouse, getting the words right is a lot more difficult given the different leaps in the melody. Despite every single Zeppelin tune circling back to the riff, Plant going from his strange delivery in the verses to screaming at the top of his lungs during the chorus is the kind of vocal acrobatics that no one should have to put themselves through unless they’ve done some serious training beforehand.
Then again, it takes a master like Plant to make the whole thing look easy when he plays. After all, the song is about the hippy idealism that his generation was searching for back in the day, and when singing every word, it felt like he found that kind of spiritual enlightenment with every word that came out of his mouth.
