Robert Plant has a way of wriggling out of nostalgia without ever being dismissive. Bring up Led Zeppelin, and instead of rolling his eyes, he’ll conjure Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. “It’s the deepest underground access for the human spirit in the United States,” he told me in 2018. “I spend a lot of time down there. I don’t know whether we could get a good acoustic sound down there…” Translation: Zeppelin reunion talk goes into the cavern, not the studio.
Plant was on the road with Carry Fire, his most recent solo effort at the time, and the record carried the usual restlessness—North African grooves, folk whispers, a pinch of rockabilly, and what he called “making music slightly erotic… like a gentleman would.” He deadpanned, “I’m a gentleman personified really. Everything still works.”
If the album feels borderless, it’s because he long ago stopped trying to play gatekeeper. “There’s no strict idiom we’re coming from,” he said of his band, the Sensational Space Shifters. “If we played ‘Johnny B. Goode’ it would sound like ‘19th Nervous Breakdown.’ It’s just the personality of the players.” Which is why he bristles when critics reduce Zeppelin’s catalogue to “hard rock.” “Somebody’s gonna tell me that ‘Friends’ or ‘Battle of Evermore’ is hard rock? I don’t think so. We weren’t rock’n’roll—we were just a band that played mean, tough stuff.”
The real revelation in this late chapter has been his collaborators. Chrissie Hynde turned up on “Bluebirds Over the Mountain,” giving a 1950s rocker the kind of push-pull that only happens when two singers are trying to out-cool each other. “We stretched it out and took it into another place,” Plant said. “It needed another voice… she really brings it home fantastically.”
But the seismic shift came earlier with Alison Krauss. What started as a casual invitation to sing Leadbelly at a tribute turned into the Grammy-stacking Raising Sand and a crash course in vocal discipline. “I’d sing a little bit different every time,” Plant recalled. “She said, ‘Wait a minute—if we’re gonna sing together, you’ve got to sing the same thing every time.’ I didn’t realize that. That’s why the Everly Brothers sounded good—neither of them ever deviated. She taught me how to yodel. I got it wrong so many times, but in the end it sounded like something I’d never done before.”
Patty Griffin kept the streak alive on 2010’s Band of Joy. “Patty Griffin has the voice of an angel,” he said, “and sometimes the delivery of a wild angel. Fantastic to sing alongside. Very, very beautiful voice.” He still keeps a wish list in his back pocket: “I’d like to make another record with Patti maybe, and Alison. I was talking about Raising Hell instead of Raising Sand.”
That combination—Griffin’s grit, Krauss’s precision, Hynde’s swagger—let Plant rediscover himself outside of Zeppelin’s shadow. “It laid the seeds for me to come back to my home country and open the box, bring the other guy back out again,” he said. And while the Zeppelin 50th anniversary that year had fans salivating, Plant made it clear he wasn’t chasing ghosts. “Of course everybody holds that band near and dear. Nobody more than me. But I don’t want to do it disservice.”
Instead, Carry Fire split its focus between the personal and the political. Songs like “New World” and “Carving Up the World Again” push back at colonialism and refugee crises. “First of all, I’m not in business—I’m in bliss,” Plant said. “Since I was ever able to be aware of stuff going on, there’s always been a story that’s appalling. Empires, colonial systems, extortion. A bow and arrow against the Gatling gun. Whatever the motives are, it’s all deplorable.”
And yet, Carry Fire is as much about love and human connection as it is about power and oppression. “Once upon a time, when I was a kid, I wanted to know about the doo-wop scene, the lyrics of teenage love,” he said. “But you get a bit older and realize it’s not all chocolate and roses. You see how the cookie does crumble, and it’s very interesting to try and capture those moments—both glorious and inglorious.”
For Plant, that balance—between grief and romance, bliss and fury—is the whole point. “At this particular time in my existence, it is breaking doors down,” he said. “It’s telling me I can move through time and still not repeat myself. Not end up like some kind of one-trick pony.” Fifty years on, he’s still proving it.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Bluebirds Over the Mountain" below!
