News The album Robert Plant thought he couldn’t make: “I doubt I have the chops for [it]”
Any artist’s goal should be to keep getting better at your craft. You may think you’ve peaked when you start playing stadiums worldwide, but there’s always some way to push yourself by going outside of your traditional comfort zone to make music. And while Robert Plant could claim to have gone in 15 different directions with Led Zeppelin over the years, his biggest challenge came when he worked with Alison Krauss.
Looking at Krauss’s approach to music, this should have been the kind of slam dunk that most classic rockers yearn for. No one can claim to scream for the rest of their lives, so to hear ‘Percy’ go from the feral screeches of songs like ‘Communication Breakdown’ to something more in line with folk songs like ‘Going to California’ practically feels like the best middle-aged compromise he could have hoped for.
It’s not like Plant hadn’t been around the block several times when it came to folk music. Before Zeppelin had started, The Band of Joy was practically a testing ground for genres like this, featuring a more psychedelic version of what Plant would do before deciding that he probably had better luck imitating artists like Steve Marriott than James Taylor.
By the time Plant got the call from Krauss, though, he was practically shaking at the idea of making an album, telling Louder, “Sometimes I doubt that I’ve got the chops for the job. It’s a challenge, not physically a challenge, but to be honest, sometimes I have to remember what Alison’s told me to do. I see her eyes flashing at me, and then she bursts out laughing”.
When you look at the different avenues Plant had gone down, it’s easy to see why he needed a refresher course. The hard part about trying out different styles on every album is that you have no time to master any of them, so getting the finer details of the songs on the album Raising Sand was not going to be easy.
The more you listen to the album, the more it’s easy to hear Plant slowly coming into his own. While the singles show him being a little more subdued than before, he seems to branch out as the album goes on, almost like he’s trying out different spaces within his vocal cords to see what works and what doesn’t.
It’s also a very welcome change from what many of the rockers of yesteryear were doing around this time. Whenever you hear about old singers trying out different styles, it’s usually going back to the kind of classic songbook era, with acts like Rod Stewart making songs that range between sophisticated and slightly boring depending on which song you’re listening to.
As for Raising Sand, though, this is the kind of album that many rockers could benefit from learning from, with Plant taking risks on every single track and trying his best to expand on his craft rather than coax by on easy mode. Plant always wanted to change with the times following the end of Zeppelin, and hearing him collaborate with Krauss is the kind of innovation that many artists wish they could be doing at his age.
