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Credit: Tom Oldham
Rod Stewart, for one, might have gone through the Great American Songbook like a family dog digging up a favourite bone, but Robert Plant and the Saving Grace band have been building a classic songbook all their own. Plant, who has drifted happily and assuredly since his heady days as a golden god of rock, has spent a lifetime playing musical hopscotch, seemingly content wherever he lands.
Whether it was the sublime rock’n’roll of his early solo career, or the surprise platinum-selling smash that came from his joyous union with Alison Krauss, or simply going back to play pub gigs with his old outfit Band Of Joy, Plant, you feel, was at peace. Although it’s a restless, ever-moving peace. Or it was, until covid stilled everything and even rock stars were forced to stop and ponder a world outside their window that was now out of reach.
Judging by this collection, recorded between April 2019 and January 2025 in the Cotswolds and on the Welsh Borders, at least some of those enforced hours were spent with Plant at home rifling through his record collection.
No one should be surprised to see here covers of Memphis Minnie (she did inspire him to record When The Levee Breaks with Led Zeppelin) or Blind Willie Johnson’s Soul Of A Man (who Plant and his same bandmates leaned on heavily for In My Time Of Dying and Nobody’s Fault But Mine). But country and folk singer-songwriter Sarah Siskind’s Too Far From You and Low’s Everybody’s Song offer some very welcome musical left turns that feel right.
It’s a given that Plant can sing anything, and his tone and timbre here are peerless. But it’s his vocal harmonies with Suzi Dian and as part of the backing vocals where he truly shines; the haunting African-American spiritual Gospel Plough – which ends with live birdsong as the band were literally recording their parts outdoor in a field due to covid – is a lovely melding of voices, and the arresting sense of musical history that Plant has a wonderful knack of resurrecting. Case in point is Memphis Minnie’s Chevrolet, set across a chiming guitar and a rolling snare drum, with a charming folksy snap, or Moby Grape’s It’s A Beautiful Day Today as an elegiac hymn sent towards the sky.
Plant’s journey continues ever on, and it’s one worth falling in step with.
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