Robert Plant gave fans an insight into his lyric writing during his latest Digging Deep podcast. Ultimate Classic Rock quoted the Led Zeppelin frontman as asking, “Whose soul are you really baring? Are you baring your own soul? Do you go into character, or do you refer to people who you care about who are in trouble? And the song pours out from another angle. That’s quite something.”
Plant, who wrote all of the lyrics to Zeppelin’s classic material, added, “My songwriting’s pretty. . . it goes in a straight line. The idea of me actually taking on the guise of somebody who’s been in some kind of situation that you can only watch from afar — it’s more than I can even imagine, to voice somebody else’s condition and actually be them in the song.”
Plant went on to rave about Bob Dylan‘s latest album, 2020’s Rough And Rowdy Ways, recalling the first time he heard the album’s opening track, “I Contain Multitudes”: “I just went, ‘This is the story of all of our lives! Except he’s taken the bends in a totally different way, the curves.’ . . . (He) could probably have written for about a week in that idiom, that way of seeing it all.” Plant deemed the tune as being, “tremendous, very moving” and “very special writing for now.”
SIDE NOTES
- Pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz revealed on the Everyone Loves Guitar podcast, that Robert Plant and Alison Krauss are prepping a followup to the pair’s 2007 album, Raising Sand.
- Robert Plant revealed he’ll be allowing his unheard music to be released after he dies. Plant said on his Digging Deep podcast: “I’ve told the kids, when I kick the bucket, open it to the public free of charge — just to see how many silly things there were down the line from 1966 to now. It’s a journey.”
CHECK IT OUT: Page & Plant on April 1st, 1995 performing “Hey, Hey What Can I Do” live in Detroit: