Music has always been about capturing an emotional experience down on tape. No matter how many times an artist might drill something into the ground whenever they go into the studio, there’s a particular element behind putting a handful of notes together that has to move something in someone’s heart before it’s committed to tape. Although Robert Plant may have been able to write brilliant melodies across every Led Zeppelin, hearing the band interpret this one blues standard was enough to get him choked up.
Before he joined Zeppelin, though, Plant was already making waves on the English scene as part of The Band of Joy. While the band’s approach to psychedelic rock had little in common with what would become Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page saw the potential in Plant’s ability to sing blues, quickly drafting him into the supergroup along with his former bandmate John Bonham behind the drums.
As the band started mining their tunes on Led Zeppelin, their repertoire was still indebted to the blues rock giants, making their renditions of tracks like ‘You Shook Me’ and ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’. Although the group would continue to elevate cover songs to massive proportions, it wasn’t long before they started to create strong enough material to rival their heroes, with Page coming up with one great lick after another on tracks like ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
Cutting their second album while working on the road, the quartet were already creating the foundation for what the group would become, keeping in the blues tradition with a fair bit of nastiness behind their riffs like ‘Heartbreaker’. Compared to the first two records, though, Led Zeppelin III marked a departure in the band’s sound, favouring acoustic instrumentation and various folk influences on songs like ‘That’s the Way’.
While ‘Immigrant Song’ would be a good salvo for many fans expecting the hard-hitting Led Zeppelin sound, the band would create a different world when approaching the blues standard ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’. Slowed down to a plaintive tempo, the song became another animal whenever the band got ahold of it, with Plant crying out in pain as Page delivered some of the most jaw-dropping moments of his career.
Even though Plant remained a professional both in the studio and on the stage, he recalled just how difficult it was to keep his composure at times, saying, “The musical progression at the end of each verse – the chord choice – is not a natural place to go. And it’s that lift up there that’s so regal and so emotional. I don’t know whether that was born from the loins of JP or JPJ, but I know that when we reached that point in the song, you could get a lump in the throat from being in the middle of it.”
Plant wouldn’t be the only one emotionally affected by the song. When talking about his main influences, Dave Grohl would also recall how Page’s guitar solo was enough to make him cry like a baby whenever he heard it. Even though many rock tracks are meant to elicit excitement from the audience half the time, it takes a certain amount of musical finesse to create a song that causes involuntary emotion in the listener.
