News The Led Zeppelin vocal performance Robert Plant called “exaggerated”
Robert Plant’s ability as a vocalist comes not only in how his voice sounds/sounded, but in how it has evolved with time. He continues to perform worldwide, but the music he releases now is entirely different to what he used to do with Led Zeppelin. Plant still sounds fantastic on records and live, but his ability to adapt and still sound outstanding throws him into the greatest of all-time category.
When Led Zeppelin first started making music, their ability as musicians was hard to ignore. Their blues-infused sound gave off the improvised chaos of the genre, but there was more structure to the tracks; they were more riff-heavy, which meant that blues and hard rock styles blended seamlessly.
Plant’s vocal ability is representative of that blues sound. He didn’t seem to approach Led Zeppelin songs in the same way other singers approached songs. He didn’t have a specific tone in mind; instead, in tracks, he seemed to start by finding his feet and then letting his vocal cords run wild. That ability to sing, screech, howl and wail his way through a track was addictive and a massive contributor towards the band’s success.
Since then, Plant’s style has evolved as he has branched further into the world of Americana whilst performing with people like Alison Krauss. This shift isn’t because the rock was too challenging, though, quite the opposite, as Plant reflects on a song he recorded with Krauss, saying that it was one of the most difficult he’s ever done.
On the 2007 album Raising Sand, he and Krauss performed a cover of the Dillard & Clark song ‘Polly’, which was re-recorded as ‘Polly Come Home’. “It’s just the most difficult piece of music to sing at the tempo that we sang it at,” said Plant, “It’s one of the toughest calls I’ve had.”
The style in which he sings on this newer music is far removed from how he used to sing in Led Zeppelin, a style which he now calls exaggerated. “It’s just such a great song, but the tempo… it was languid, it was magnificent,” he said. “But it was a hell of a challenge… I know the full, open-throated falsetto that I was able to concoct in 1968 carried me through until I was tired of it. Then that sort of exaggerated personality of a vocal performance morphed and went somewhere else.”
He specifically mentions the track ‘Immigrant Song’ when talking about his old singing style. It’s arguably one of the band’s most notable songs, namely thanks to Plant’s screaming vocals that open it up, and in that sense, it’s the exaggeration which is so compelling.
“But as a matter of fact, I was playing in Reykjavik, in Iceland, about three years ago, just before Covid,” he recalled, “It was Midsummer Night, and there was a festival, and I got my band, and I said, ‘OK, let’s do ‘Immigrant Song.’ They’d never done it before. We just hit it, and bang – there it was. I thought, ‘Oh, I didn’t think I could still do that.’”
Plant’s ability to adapt his vocal style is why he is such a timeless figure in music. He had a more exaggerated style in Led Zeppelin, which he can still do, but instead of reeling off the hits, he has decided to go down a different lane that continues to challenge him.
