Which Led Zeppelin Track Best Reveals Robert Plant’s Voice?
Ask which Led Zeppelin track best showcases Robert Plant with his unique talent and convention dictates: Stairway to Heaven, Whole Lotta Love, Black Dog. They are not bad tracks - far from it! - but they don't answer the question.
What makes Robert Plant’s Zeppelin-era singing so distinctive in the first place? Not merely the high notes, the scream, the intimate purr. Plant’s early voice is a peculiar compound: a bright, metallic upper register; blues phrasing and bending; a capacity to move from folkish vulnerability to banshee assault; and, crucially, a relationship with Jimmy Page’s guitar in which the voice becomes a second lead instrument rather than a singer riding above the band.
Whole Lotta Love is definitive theatre, but more about persona and studio drama than the complete vocal package. Stairway to Heaven is too ceremonially iconic: magnificent, overfamiliar even. But the song’s architecture tends to both dominate and restrict the whole range which Plant can bring to a song. Black Dog is too constricted to showcase Plant's full vocal resources.
There is a choice of answers.
If the question is: which track most completely displays the early Plant phenomenon, choose Babe I’m Gonna Leave You. It has the quiet, breathy intimacy; the blues anguish; the sudden vault into full-throated attack; the strange mixture of beauty, melodrama and sexual danger. It's not just Plant singing well; it's Plant's unique charisma as he totally inhabits the song.
If the question is where Plant is most completely a singer, then the answer is one of my favourite tracks: Since I’ve Been Loving You. There the issue is less range than intelligence: phrasing, restraint, ache, timing, the exact pressure placed on a note before it breaks. Voice and guitar seem to argue the same emotional case, phrase by phrase. Plant with Page, at their extraordinary best.
