Interviewer: Alan Light – Relix, December 2014

AT FIRST GLANCE, you don’t notice him. It’s a little hard to believe – he is, after all, one of the most recognizable, distinctive, and flamboyant front men in rock & roll history. But right now, with the band of seven musicians arranged more or less in a circle on the stage of the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, the guy in jeans and a faded gray t-shirt, with his hair tied up in a bun. But then they count off the song and that voice comes out, and he doesn’t need to turn around for you to know that it’s Robert Plant. Still, he’s not delivering the keening, spine-tingling wail that filled stadiums with Led Zeppelin; it’s a more nuanced sound he’s working with as he rehearses his band, the Sensational Space Shifters, on this September afternoon, prior to the first stop in a quick, six-city US tour. And as they start to play, now it’s the song that takes a minute to register – it’s ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’, the searing Blind Willie Johnson blues lament that Led Zeppelin turned into a jagged assault on the 1976 Presence album, arranged instead with a loping, back-porch rhythm and a multi-part vocal harmony.

This air of uncertainty all makes some kind of sense. Plant has spent his recent years sneaking up on expectations, surprising people with his musical choices, and earning a newfound, hard-earned respect that no one would have anticipated. After Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980 following the death of drummer John Bonham, for decades his solo career was of sporadic interest; the music was never sub-par, but his direction often felt aimless or uncertain. When Plant joined forces with his old foil Jimmy Page in the ’90s, merging his own interest in Arabic styles with the Zeppelin catalogue and similar blues-based approaches on the MTV Unplugged project No Quarter and the Walking Through Clarksdale album, the results were both successful and an inevitable letdown. Following those projects, several Plant albums in a row failed to break the Top 20.

Then came the pivotal year of 2007, when he joined Page, John Paul Jones, and Bonham’s son, Jason, for the triumphant, one-night-only Led Zeppelin reunion show at London’s O2 arena (more than twenty million people around the world entered the ticket lottery) – and when he also released Raising Sand, his collaboration with bluegrass colossus Allison Krauss that won five Grammy awards, including Album of the Year. It was followed by another glorious exploration of American music, 2010’s Band of Joy, and a magnificent tour. Four years, and a lot of global travel, later comes his tenth solo album, Lullaby and…the Ceaseless Roar, a swirling, thrilling blend of African, Middle Eastern, rock, blues, and folk music that may be the most daring work he’s done since the Zeppelin days.

Seated in his spacious and homey, though not extravagant dressing room (a single flowing, print shirt hangs on a rod, waiting for show time), overlooking the local train station, though, the 66-year-old Plant insists that he’s been on the same mission all along. “I think so, starting from when I was about fifteen,” he says. “It’s the flexing of public perception and people buying into the idea that’s fluctuated. In the beginning, there was nobody there – just an empty room, maybe three people. And in 1965, it was free to get in! And then through time, the amazing pinnacles of exchange with energy, which included absurdities and cherry bombs and social disease and penicillin immunity, and stress and some joy, and freedom and capture and prisons – all those things spin around, and we end up here, in this fancy dressing room. Not bad, all things considered.”

PLANT IS the rare celebrity who is actually bigger than you imagine – long legs, broad shoulders, huge head. He laughs often as he stretches out across a low sofa, sipping water and recounting his journeys and adventures. (He displayed his sense of humor on some recent television appearances, singing doo-wop into an iPad with Jimmy Fallon and jokingly handing Stephen Colbert a joint on air.) Mostly, though, he lights up when he talks about music, drawing connections, dropping very difficult-to-spell names, describing sounds and voices and rhythms from far-flung corners of the earth. His enthusiasm and sense of discovery only seem to have expanded with time. “He’s a walking encyclopedia of everything that’s good musically,” says Buddy Miller, who played guitar on the Raising Sand tour and co-produced the Band of Joy album. “He’s one of those sponge guys; he just absorbs good stuff from everyplace and, through his own filter, something new comes from it. Robert never wants to revisit past just to regurgitate or repeat it. Any time we looked at a Led Zeppelin song, it would never be from the place of listening to it or remembering the riffs – it was, let’s distill it down to what it was at the germ and run it through who we are now.”

“I admire his longevity, creativity, and his storytelling, but it’s his youthful enthusiasm that I’m most impressed with,” says Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. “Growing up a lover of blues music was a lonely thing for me – absolutely none of my friends shared my passion for it, but I couldn’t get enough. Robert and I both grew up obsessed with the same images of rural American mystery, those potent regional sounds from all around the US, not just the Delta. When I hang with Robert, it’s like I finally get to share that excitement with someone.” Though Plant has spent most of his lifetime wandering in pursuit of musical encounters, he claims that his time spent in the American South seemed on its way to becoming a permanent arrangement. “I had the most amazing late honeymoon through my adventures in Nashville, with the great game that is that kind of music,” he says. “The quality and the resonance of the American musicians I was with were unparalleled. I thought that I was going to be spending the rest of my days here in America. But the thing about being British is that you tend to start listening to songs from the Appalachians and the Smokey Mountains, and quite a few of them come from where I’d run away from. So I just kept on getting drawn back to the UK more and more.

“Also, as it happened, at that very time, my soccer team started doing very well in England,” he continues. “And I was getting all these summons from my two boys going, ‘What in God’s name are you doing out there? The place is on fire back here, and the team are top of the league and people are crying in the streets, grown men are pulling their own heads off, the birth rate has gone up in the city of Wolverhampton, people are smiling again.’ So it was a calling to go back – for every reason really.” Plant maintains that he could tell that the Band of Joy – which started after he opted out of a second album with Krauss – had run its course: Miller needed to work on the music for the ABC series Nashville, Patty Griffin had her own record to make, 2013’s American Kid. (Presumably, the end of his relationship with Griffin, with whom he was living in Austin, was also a factor.) “With a band, you’ve got to know that it goes somewhere that matches my energy and my idea of where it might go,” he says. “And I think with the Band of Joy, everybody sort of naturally fell off, back into things that they know they can do, because it wasn’t a writing band. I learned how to sing better, but I also learned that a project can get to the end of its lifespan and kind of fizzle out.” “Before he started this new record, he came over to my house and we wrote and recorded a bunch of songs,” says Miller. “But then it was time for him to go home. He just goes where his heart takes him.”

Returning to England, specifically to the Black Country region where he grew up, proved to be a more powerful experience for Plant than he anticipated. “Going back to the particular place I come from, it’s a very visual, panoramic feast that I’ve ignored,” Plant says. “There’s a lot of emotion packed into it as well. And that was a very arresting feeling for a guy my age – I missed it, but I didn’t know I missed it. I hadn’t seen it even when I was there. I took it for granted, and I wanted a new start, I wanted to get the fuck out of there.” While Plant was home, some of the musicians who had played with him on several albums under the name the Strange Sensation were performing as part of the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival. “There were all these great authors, writers, statesmen, politicians – and in the middle of it, these four guys were playing, and they were kicking up one hell of a storm,” he says. “They were playing in a huge tent, on the side of the Misty Mountains, and I heard the unadulterated power, unabridged and not at all self-conscious, of just letting go. I thought, ‘That’s a long way from what I’ve been doing, I wonder if I can still do that stuff?’ So from Townes Van Zandt and George Jones, Charlie Rich, Lefty Frizzell, and all that stuff, I was zooming right back into West African trance.”

Before he started, though, he felt a need to immerse himself in the Middle Eastern sounds that were beckoning to him. He paid a visit to Morocco, a place that has inspired Plant at least as far back as the days of Led Zeppelin’s landmark ‘Kashmir’, which was written following a 1973 trip to the country. “I went out to Essaouira, where the Gnaoua (world music) festival is, and that kind of sultry beat got me again,” he says. “I was walking through the streets and there was dust flying everywhere, and everywhere there was a thud and thump, some kind of rumble and crash, and I thought, ‘Can I still find that big voice?’ And I went and found it.” He gathered up the veterans from the Strange Sensation – guitarists Justin Adams and Liam “Skin” Tyson, bassist Billy Fuller, and keyboard player John Baggott – now joined by drummer Dave Smith and African multi-instrumentalist Juldeh Camara and rechristened the Sensational Space Shifters, a fittingly mystical name for the sound they were making, which transcended continents and decades. The group began touring in 2012, initially playing Plant’s catalogue and radically transformed blues songs, harnessing and focusing their widespread influences into a new, cohesive style.

“We had this kind of swampy, syrupy thing going on,” Plant says, “which I think is quite unique because we can mix Leadbelly and the Stanley Brothers and urban, British Bristol trance, and they all sound like they’re already in bed together. It was so infectious and hypnotic, the crowds were going apeshit in South America and at the festivals in Europe. It felt like a whole new part of my musical life, so I thought ‘This is it, we should be recording now, this is our album.’ And, of course, then it was brought to my attention that we didn’t actually have any songs.” They took a break in touring and developed some ideas – “little tiny vignettes, stuff scratched in the margin of another long day” – into the songs that would make up Lullaby and…the Ceaseless Roar. “We’ve got a lot of history, companionship, friendship, and lots of hours of playing,” says Adams. “There’s never been a band with this kind of line-up, and we created a language together over two years of touring, and our adventures continue to color us. Robert was coming up with an honest and personal approach to lyric writing. The package just seems to have a really great energy.”

The album opens with a radical reworking of the traditional Appalachian tune ‘Little Maggie’, complete with drum loops and Camara’s one-string ritti fiddle. Originals like ‘Rainbow’ and ‘A Stolen Kiss’ veer from British folk to club beats, and by the time you hit the reconfiguration of Leadbelly’s ‘Poor Howard’, it’s impossible to know what to call this music. On stage, it comes alive even more, as with a set-closing medley at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in which the Space Shifters wove Muddy Waters’ ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ and Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love’ in and out of Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, driving the audience into a frenzy. (And after all these years, there’s still no one else who can brandish a mic stand the way Plant can.) “The nature of this band is that there’s improvisation, surprise, a conversation that’s going on onstage,” says Adams. “And I love to get Robert excited, because if you do something that catches his ear, he’ll give it back to you times ten.”

Plant is well aware of the risks involved in this kind of eclectic ambition. “In the wrong hands, it could be quite insipid, or like a world music fiesta, and I don’t want that,” he says. “Because from Mexico to Morocco to Mali to Mozambique, everybody is playing for joy and for an impression with people. Entertainers are entertainers; this is not a study, not a night school course. This is melding, blending, throwing everything into a fire and seeing how the sparks come out. It could be a mess, and sometimes it is, but then we just get an eraser.” He also does a certain amount of connecting the dots with the lyrics, which incorporate lines and images familiar from blues classics, and even quotes from Led Zeppelin songs. “I want people to know that I’m pulling points of reference from other times and other places – incongruous and out of step and kilter – into another world,” he says. “I’ve done it with the Zeppelin lyrics, as well – “if the sun refused to shine” and “the road remains the same” and all the shit. There’s so many bits like that, because I like the idea of spinning the bottle. And If one or two people pick up on it, that’s justice, that’s about right.”

One thing that saves Lullaby from feeling like a world music grad-student project is the sense of spontaneity and wildness in the recordings, a rawness which Plant asserts is always his goal. “I don’t like hanging about,” he says. “I think quite often the first two vocal takes are all I need. Whether it’s good or bad, I don’t care. It was the same with Zeppelin, really – especially something like In Through the Out Door or Physical Graffiti, there’s so many places where I could have maybe done better, but I’d have lost the feel. You’re closer to all the great gods up there – the Wolf and Charley Patton and Mario Lanza and all that stuff. You’ve got to get up there and reach for it, and have the essence still on board. “When I hear the Zeppelin records now, they’ve been hawked and whored to such a degree that you start to wonder what in God’s name is going on. But then when you hear it, in isolation, in one minute of quiet calm, you remember what the actual spell was and how it was cast.”

NOT SURPRISINGLY, Robert Plant has been approached by numerous broadcasters and filmmakers over the years, asking him if he would allow cameras to accompany him on his various musical expeditions. There’s no doubt he would be an ideal host and ambassador to introduce an even bigger audience to the sounds of the planet, but he has no interest in the idea. “I don’t want to do anything like that,” he says. “All the journeying and the adventures, all the nights of ridiculous conversation, that all comes out on stage. It’s like a travelogue. And that’s enough, really.” It is striking the extent to which all of Plant’s explorations and escapades keep adding to his work. Where other musicians might dabble in an exotic sound or two and move on, with him it continues to accrue, and to merge into a lifelong quest.

A few years ago, Jimmy Page told me why he thought so many rock critics were hostile to Led Zeppelin during the band’s career. “Each of our albums is so radically different,” he said, “I just think that the reviewers didn’t have a clue as to what we were doing. They were totally perplexed and bewildered. The passage of time, though, has shown what it was that the fans could connect and relate to.” It’s this balance between experimentation and continuity, this search for common ground without repetition, that fascinates Plant. He explains, for instance, that his work on Raising Sand and Band of Joy changed the very way that he sings. “Singing with Alison or Patty or Buddy or whoever, I have to hold the structure of what I’m singing straight,” he says. “So it’s not so much about free-form performance, it’s more about the elegance and the really beautiful moments of swinging it with another voice. I also learned to hang on to the melody working on those albums, and because of that, I brought the melodies into this album a lot more. In the past, I’ve really been quite wayward with the way I sing. My heroes had a rough melody – it was all about expressive singing, in between the main punch lines – but when you’re singing harmonies you can’t do that.

“The fact that we created so many trance moments on this album allowed me to get strong vocal lines without having to overcook them – to bring the big voice back in some way or another, but to go to a new place of understatement, and make my vocal performance something to work within and around the trance thing. I never thought I could get to this, and it’s far out for me.” Our voices go through journeys as we get older, and Robert’s beautiful side has just blossomed,” says Buddy Miller. “His high, screaming register may not be as high and screaming, but to me, his voice is very moving.”

Probably because he feels such dedication to constantly move forward, Plant is also able to look back without agonizing; he speaks easily about Led Zeppelin, with an air of both pride and amusement. His tone is all the more striking compared to the ways in which the band’s legacy seems to have paralyzed Page, whose ongoing oversight of the Zep catalogue is meticulous, but doesn’t lead to any new work (though the guitarist has apparently finally, grudgingly accepted that the singer was serious when he said that the 2007 reunion was a one-shot deal). Plant says that he has listened to and enjoyed the most recent set of expanded Zeppelin reissues, complete with alternate and live takes of many of their classics. “Before they were remasters, they were just cassettes, or old quarter-inch tapes,” he says. “It’s just like when we put out Coda, after John passed – I was the only guy who had a quarter-inch of ‘Poor Tom’ with the vocal on it, because we tried a vocal idea and I took it back home, and twenty years later, I pull it out of the cupboard and we bake it and play it, and it’s good. There are ten million cassettes of work in progress, and every band everywhere has got them.

“It’s like building any song – the consummate, ultimate conclusion passes through a million changes before it gets to that point. ‘Out on the Tiles’ from Zeppelin 3, I just happen to have a copy of that with Jonesy singing the melody, but he’s paying me sufficient money not to put that out. There’s a couple of great bootlegs out from Physical Graffiti –Tangible Vandalism, one is called – and Jimmy’s guitar line on ‘Trampled Under Foot’ is simply beautiful. It ended up absolutely appropriate for what it was, but there’s so many things like that, you hear and go, ‘Wow, what that was like!’ But it is coming from 35, 40 years ago, it’s invention, it’s the journey to get to the place that it got to, it’s just part of the process. And it’s a bit random, in most cases.”

Even before the Zeppelin days, when he and Bonham were in the original, psychedelic Band of Joy and playing bars in their native region of England, Plant has always thrived in the context of a truly collaborative group. It may be his name out front, but he knows that the best of his work comes from harnessing the ideas and the energy of other curious, challenging musicians. “My raison d’etrereally is to be in a tribe,” he says. “I’m fortunate because I know this huge broad spectrum of stuff which I can draw upon. I’m like a catalyst for other people, and I get in there and I point and shout and sparkle and I get this thing. It stops it from being just me, and it brings everybody else into the wash. When I was in Austin and everybody had gone, I really felt my limitations – I’ve got a lot of energy and ideas, but I need to hear it all around me and almost pick it out. So it was kind of handy that I came back, because I’d have still been sitting there, sweeping the porch.”

If he has any regrets, in fact, it’s that he didn’t push himself to follow his instincts and be more daring with his music even earlier. “I suppose really I should have started singing music in this fashion, this motif, twenty years ago,” he says. “I should have been much more of a traveler then – well, I was a traveler, but I didn’t take the opportunities, and I kept most of it to myself. “When I was working with Page and we did No Quarter, it was strong, but we were really modifying the music by gluing these spectacularly dramatic moments and Egyptian popular orchestration to songs that weren’t going to change form. To morph completely, you can lose 80 percent of your audience, but the 20 percent that sticks around has a real ball.” And so, in the end, it’s the lead singer – the figure so often dismissed as the show-off in a band, the salesman, the ego rather than the brains – who gets the last laugh. The reviews of Lullaby and of this recent tour consistently contain a tone of slight amazement, as if it just now dawning on people that Robert Plant has persevered and thrived and somehow concocted one of the most interesting careers of his revolutionary generation.

“I think people have realized what a diamond he is,” says Justin Adams. “To have someone who comes from that late ’60s, early ’70s period, when the blueprint of what rock music is was formed, somebody who was breaking boundaries, and who is also doing something really contemporary sounding – it’s a moment when people are realizing that we’ve really got a treasure with Robert Plant.” “I think he’s only gotten better with age,” says Dan Auerbach. “We played a festival with him in France this year, and it was one of the best shows I’ve seen in years.” Yet Plant asserts that he’s still growing and learning, and that his greatest passion really surfaces when he’s able to just listen. “The student in me takes me to places where I marvel at the music,” he says. “When my youngest boy passed his driving test about three or four years ago, I said, ‘Come on, let’s go to Morocco!’ And we went down to the south and rented a car and started heading for the dunes of Merzouga, on the Algerian border. I made him drive and he said, ‘But Dad, I’ve only just passed my test!’ I said, ‘How many people do you think have passed a test out here? There is no test – just drive!’

“So we drove and we laughed, and the radio was on and this music was coming out, and all these Berber tracks were all using a vocoder, so they all sounded like Cher! So you’ve got one bendir banging on a hand drum, one fiddle, and this girl singing, from the very morning of the earth, and then suddenly it goes into this Cher warble, and it was fantastic. So I go to be impressed, I go to be moved, and I go to laugh. Who cares if it’s right or wrong? It’s only entertainment, and people can walk away. And same for me, with these shows – it doesn’t matter, people will come or they won’t. If they come and they don’t like it, they won’t come back. The ticket price isn’t breaking the bank. It’s just, ‘Come and have a look at this, it’s great fun.’”

Robert Plant has staked out a position of tremendous, but very rare, power; for now, he’s winning a battle that everyone from U2 to Prince to Lady Gaga struggles with every day. Having been to the mountaintop of elite rock stardom, he is genuinely comfortable at a lower altitude, with the freedom to take his music wherever he wants, and the confidence that he has enough fans to support him wherever he goes.

“This is my reward,” he says. “You may find that hard to believe, but it’s true.”