It’s been more than 50 years since Led Zeppelin released their iconic song, “Stairway to Heaven.”
With so much time having past, Robert Plant reflected on what the hit means to him now during an interview with Rolling Stone.
“When I hear it in isolation, I feel overwhelmed for every single reason you could imagine,” he admitted.
“There was a mood and an air of trying to make it through. The world is a different place. Everybody was reeling from Vietnam and the usual extra helping of corruption with politics. There were people who were really eloquent who brought it home far less pictorially and did a much better job of reaching that point. But I am what I am, and as my grandfather said, ‘I can’t be more ‘am’-erer.’”
He also touched on whether or not he believed people ever got the point of the song.
“I have no idea. I mean, it was such a long time ago,” Plant said.
“I used to say it in Zeppelin, ‘This is a song of hope.’ And it’s crazy, really, because it was gargantuan at the time. The musical construction was, at its time, something very special, and I know that Jimmy and the guys were really, really proud of it, and they gave it to me and said, ‘What are you going to do about this?’ So I set about trying to write something which I suppose drops into the same idiom as something like ‘The Rover’ later on, or maybe ‘Rain Song,’ something where there’s some optimism and reflection from someone who was really not [old]. I was 23 or something like that.”
