… Robert Plant will always take pride in what he helped create with Led Zeppelin, but that was in the past. He’s hounded by fans holding onto any ounce of hope that the good ol days would come back around. Not happening. Plant recently talked with USA TODAY, saying,
“I hear the sound of time roaring past me, and there is no time to lose. And if some fans are somewhat befuddled regarding the globetrotting blend of sounds on the new LP, perhaps they just don’t realize that he’s always been something of a world explorer as an artist.
“It is appropriate for my time in life,” he mused on the subject of his latest sound, although he cautioned that it doesn’t really fit the “world music” label assigned by some critics. “If it were world music, we would be the least-successful world musicians because we desecrate,” he continued. “I like to think it is different — something completely without … a name people would call it.”
That nameless, boundary-free ideal is something Plant previously noticed with the Grateful Dead, a band that was able to play in and around its own legacy without needing to worry about much in the way of responsibility to the past. As he put it, “There were Deadheads, and it was a good place to be.”
Explaining that the Dead earned their following because they “didn’t compromise” and “weren’t technicolor rock gods,” he concluded, “they were coming from a place that, even though it was from an altered state, it was definitely real. … That is what I want.”
