Robert Anthony Plant CBE (born 20 August 1948) is a British singer and songwriter, best known as the lead singer and lyricist of the English rock band Led Zeppelin…
A rare snowy day in Nashville, Tennessee set the stage for an even rarer event an intimate concert by rock icon Robert Plant at the War Memorial Auditorium. Performing with his new, Grammy-nominated group aptly titled the Band of Joy (which includes fellow luminaries Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin), Plant played both Led Zeppelin classics and new songs that continue to have an impact on the music scene today…
At their best, cover albums have a strange way of galvanizing an artist by returning to the songs that inspired them; the artists can find the reason why they made music in the first place, perhaps finding a new reason to make music. Robert Plant's Dreamland – his first solo album in nearly ten years and one of the best records he's ever done, either as a solo artist or as a member of Led Zeppelin – fulfills that simple definition of a covers album and goes beyond it, finding Plant sounding reinvigorated and as restless as a new artist. Part of the reason why this album works so well is that he has a new band – not a group of supporting musicians, but a real band whose members can challenge him because they tap into the same eerie, post-folk mysticism that fueled Led Zeppelin III, among other haunting moments in the Zep catalog.
At first, Fate of Nations seems so light and airy that it slips away through the layers of acoustic guitars, violins, and keyboards. Upon further listenings, more textures appear, and the album gains a calm sense of tension and reflectiveness…
Robert Plant opens Carry Fire with "The May Queen," a song that can't help but stir up memories of "Stairway to Heaven," the most mystical number Led Zeppelin ever cut. "The May Queen" doesn't sound a thing like "Stairway to Heaven," which is deliberate. As Plant murmurs about "the dimming of his light," the churning folk-rock – a rootless, restless gypsy hybrid of American, English, and Middle East traditions – comes to crest upon a violin line that appears to quote "Prodigal Son," a gospel blues attributed to Robert Wilkins. It's hard not to read this as a sly wink to the audience, a suggestion that Plant, after years of rambling, has returned to where he belongs.