The one song Robert Plant could never do justice to: “I couldn’t hold a candle to it”
There was never any reference point for where someone like Robert Plant came from when he first started singing for Led Zeppelin.
Everyone had tried their hand at delivering the most bluesy songs that they could ever muster when they first got started in the British hard rock scene, but Plant seemed to have a fifth gear in his throat whenever he was going for some of the more acrobatic moments in Zeppelin’s catalogue. But even if he had a lot of great moments among his bandmates, he understood that there were more than a few bands that he didn’t exactly want to bother touching on.
At the same time, Plant was one to learn the hard way that some styles didn’t suit his voice. There was no doubt that his time in Zeppelin was timeless, but even for a band that has some of the greatest rock and roll songs under their belt, it’s not like everyone is going to be telling you with a straight face that ‘Hot Dog’ was one of the best songs they ever made. The Elvis Presley impression was passable, but it was much better when Plant was leaping into the rafters for some of their masterpieces.
But as time went by, no one was expecting Plant to channel his inner ‘Percy’ every single time he sang. Expecting anyone to keep up that track record for that long is practically impossible, and even if their one reunion show in 2007 is still one of the finest ways for a band to go out, it was clear that Plant had no problem with leaving the legacy where it was. He wanted to make a more natural version of whatever he liked at the time, and if it didn’t connect with everyone, so what?
Not everyone was exactly asking for him to channel his inner David Byrne when he first started working on his 1980s albums, but when he found his calling in folk music, Allison Krauss was the perfect vocal partner for him. He could delve into his lower register and embrace the inner bluesman that he always wanted to be, but even if his heroes were a little different, there was never any point in trying to compete with the same standard that Ray Charles had.
Charles had practically invented the idea of soul music well before the genre even existed, and even if giants like Marvin Gaye and Al Green would come after him, there’s no way of matching the diction he had. Whether he was singing country songs, jazz standards, or even old blues tunes, you could hear the years of experience in Charles’s voice that didn’t normally come out of any other rock and roll band.
And while Plant did have a great love of old bluesmen like Charles, he said that he knew better than trying to match what he could do, saying, “You can’t tell now because I knew I couldn’t do ‘Drown in My Own Tears.’ I couldn’t hold a candle to it, but I absorbed [people like] Presley and Charles.” And you can really hear the kind of passion that he had for that kind of music when he eventually made records like Raising Sand.
He wasn’t going to delve into his deeper register with Jimmy Page’s guitar roaring next to him, but with a more mellow band behind him, he was a lot freer to take a few chances. That sounds a lot easier to do, but it’s actually ten times harder for someone like Plant, especially when he’s been used to making records that were all about bludgeoning people from the minute that they heard them.
He had to turn himself into that kind of mellow singer, and while the rest of the world took a little while to adjust, it was better for him to follow his bliss like this than worry about singing ‘Immigrant Song’ until his dying day. It’s every artist’s job to grow up, and getting the chance to embrace this side of his sound made a lot more sense than worrying about bringing ‘Percy’ out every single night.
