The two Led Zeppelin songs Robert Plant always hated: “I’m embarrassed by this”
Musical innovation defined the 1970s, and Led Zeppelin were at the forefront. The British band were inspired by blues and pioneered a hard rock sound that has proven to be highly influential. After forming in 1968, the band rose to prominence a few years into their career, with one of their biggest tracks, ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ emerging in 1971.
Despite being incredibly successful and developing a massive following of dedicated worshippers who have allowed them to become one of the best-selling bands of all time, some of the members came to dislike some of the songs that made them so big in the first place. Surprisingly, Robert Plant, the band’s lead vocalist, has had some negative things to say about ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
The song appeared on their album Led Zeppelin IV, with folk and progressive rock influences merging to create an iconic song almost eight minutes in length. The band inevitably got tired of playing it, however, after it became such a staple of live sets. Plant was particularly fatigued by it, and in 1988, he shared with Q, “If you absolutely hated ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ no one can blame you for that because it was so pompous.”
The sprawling track is certainly a track you can’t ignore; it moves through various instrumental flavours as Plant sings, resulting in a structure of rather epic proportions. Plant’s main issue with the song is his lyrical contributions, though. “Lyrically, now, I can’t relate to it because it was so long ago. I would have no intention ever to write along those abstract lines anymore,” he once said.
He even declared decades later, “But my contribution was to write lyrics and to sing a song about fate and something very British, almost abstract, but coming out of the mind of a 23-year-old guy. It landed in the years of the era of 23-year-old guys.”
That’s not the only song he dislikes. There’s a Zeppelin track from the same album he labelled as “embarrassing” – the fantasy-inspired ‘The Battle of Evermore’. While most fans of the band enjoy the track, Plant can’t say the same. He once said, “I was living in a dream then, talking about C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. And, of course, it brings hoops of derision into everybody who picked up a guitar or got near a microphone by 1980…the thing about ‘Evermore’ is… I said to Alison [Krauss], ‘I’m embarrassed by this.’ She said, ‘But you can’t be embarrassed, because it’s a young person’s moments by living in an area which is like that, which resonates that period.’”
The song, with its allusions to The Lord of the Rings, is one of the band’s most lyrically compelling pieces about the battle between good and evil forces. Plant even played the song frequently with Krauss when they toured together in 2008, so he can’t hate the song that much. Still, like ‘Stairway to Heaven’, he finds that the lyrical content just isn’t good enough.
It appears that out of all of their songs, Plant’s distaste for ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is the strongest. He even paid a radio station $10,000 to never play the song, believing that no one needed to ever hear it again.
Plant’s discomfort with these songs speaks less to any failure in their construction and more to the distance between the man he was and the man he became. ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and ‘The Battle of Evermore’ were born from a very specific moment, when British mysticism, fantasy literature, and youthful abstraction felt both urgent and sincere. Decades later, Plant no longer inhabits that headspace, and revisiting it feels less like nostalgia and more like reading a diary written by someone else.
That tension is part of what makes Led Zeppelin endure. The songs that Plant struggles to embrace are the very ones that captured an era and inspired generations to pick up guitars, chase grandeur, and think beyond verse-chorus convention. Artists evolve, audiences freeze moments in time, and somewhere between those two truths lies the strange afterlife of a classic. Plant may cringe at ‘Stairway to Heaven’, but its power exists independently now, untethered from the 23-year-old who once wrote it.
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.