The Song Hasn't Remained The Same
How Robert Plant built himself remarkable post-Led Zeppelin renaissance.
Last week, I had the pleasure of taking in a concert by erstwhile Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant and his bluegrass collaborator Alison Krauss at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. Plant always puts on a good show, mixing new tunes along with new interpretations of timeless Zeppelin songs and earlier solo work—and last week’s performance at Wolf Trap’s outdoor northern Virginia venue was no exception.
But it also got me thinking that of all the members of all the classic rock bands of the late 1960s and 1970s, Plant—that one-time self-proclaimed golden god—has built by far the most interesting latter-day career. Eschewing a mere continuation of his work with Zeppelin, Plant has ranged from synth-driven pop and world-music-tinged re-imaginings of Zeppelin classics to electro-rock covers and Americana collaborations. Over the decades, Plant has shown himself to be a restless artist unwilling to rest on his laurels or remain in the comfort zone established by his previous work.
Comparisons with his rock-god peers only reinforces Plant’s lofty standing: members of the Beatles, for instance, recorded a number of stellar albums and songs in the 1970s—think George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, John Lennon’s “Instant Karma,” or Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” and Band on the Run. The Rolling Stones remain a going concern despite the loss of core band personnel like drummer Charlie Watts, as does the Who (notwithstanding lead guitarist and songwriter Pete Townsend’s otherwise interesting solo work). By contrast, Plant has managed to keep evolving and charting new musical directions in the decades since Led Zeppelin’s end—and in particular since the creative renaissance inaugurated with his 2002 album Dreamland.
Plant’s initial solo work marked an apparent shift away from the hard rock for which Zeppelin still remains best-known in the public consciousness. “In the Mood,” probably his most well-known post-Zeppelin song, features catchy vocal syncopation over synthesizers and jingling guitars. The ruminative numbers “Big Log,” also from the 1983 album The Principle of Moments, and “Ship of Fools,” from 1988’s Now and Zen, are not exactly what one might expect from the hard rock’s greatest front man. But no one who heard any Led Zeppelin album should have been surprised: even the band’s most popular record, its untitled fourth effort, featured quiet acoustic numbers like “The Battle of Evermore” and “Going to California,” while their final album—largely written by Plant and bassist John Paul Jones while Page and drummer John Bonham incapacitated themselves with heroin and alcohol, respectively—incorporates synthesizers heavily on tracks like “All My Love.”
In the 1990s, Plant reunited with Page for two albums, the first a fascinating reinterpretation of Led Zeppelin classics recorded live in Morocco. Titled No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded, the album and its arrangements reflect Plant’s long-time interest in world music—with an epic, North African-inflected orchestral treatment of “Kashmir” as the album’s most memorable track by a considerable margin. The second record, 1998’s otherwise forgettable Walking Into Clarksdale, did yield songs that Plant would later rearrange and re-record both with Krauss and on his own solo albums.
It's from the 2000s onward, however, that Plant truly strikes out in new and interesting musical directions—starting with the haunting and otherworldly Dreamland, an album largely comprised of somewhat obscure covers like “Morning Dew” and “Darkness, Darkness.” He continued in a similar vein with the 2004’s Mighty Rearranger, an original effort backed by a band dubbed The Strange Sensation—which later evolved into the core of his studio and touring group, the Sensational Space Shifters. Both albums successfully blend elements of world music, folk, electronica, and hard rock into a coherent whole, providing a sonic template for Plant’s subsequent records.
Plant then famously collaborated with Alison Krauss on the moody Americana record Raising Sand in 2007 before assembling a new group for his 2010 roots rock-inspired covers album Band of Joy. The latter record represents something of a fusion of the styles found in his previous three albums, with the psychedelic rock and folk soundscapes of Dreamland and Mighty Rearranger merging the subdued Americana of Raising Sand on songs like “You Can’t Buy My Love” and “Even This Shall Pass Away.”
More adventurous were 2014’s lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar and 2017’s Carry Fire, albums of mostly original material that saw Plant go even deeper into the territory he’d explored in Dreamland and Mighty Rearranger. “Rainbow” from lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar and the title track from Carry Fire embody the way Plant ties his favorite genres together in his late-career work to yield new music that paradoxically conjures up a misty, mystical atmosphere with great precision and detail. It’s a sensibility Plant brought to 2021’s Raise the Roof, his second album with Alison Krauss and one that doesn’t simply reprise the sound of Raising Sand but also blends in some of Plant’s own recent solo work.
It's not confined to the studio, either—Plant rearranges versions of Led Zeppelin songs and his own earlier solo work for his live concerts. Unlike some contemporary rock gods who still try (and often fail) to hit the same notes they did decades ago, Plant remolds classics like “Rock and Roll” and “Going to California” to suit both his current, mature voice and the strengths of whatever band he happens to be playing with at the moment. The result is a far more compelling performance than simple reiterations of earlier arrangements already etched in the minds of all those in attendance.
Both in the studio and performing live over the past two decades, then, Plant has curated a unique musical mélange of his own founded on his own kaleidoscopic suite of influences and experiences. Rather than retreading or revisiting what worked so well with Led Zeppelin and retreating into an eternal greatest hits jukebox tour like so many other rock giants of his era—or simply going silent after an initial stab at a solo career—Plant chose instead to dig deep and give those of us who listen to him all these years on what we didn’t even know we needed from him.