Howard Stern recently uploaded a video of himself doing an awful impersonation of Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant . The Stern Show wrote on YouTube, “After hearing there would be a new Led Zeppelin documentary, Howard wanted to see if he could match Robert Plant’s high notes on ‘Immigrant Song.'”
During a recent edition of his Digging Deep podcast, Robert Plant further discussed Townes Van Zandt and how he used that song for his album Band of Joy. Plant discussed Van Zandt earlier on in the podcast where he talked about covering Townes Van Zandt’s “Nothin’” on 2007’s Raising Sand with Alison Krauss. Plant reacted to a big star abuse story on the show as well. Alternative Nation transcribed Plant’s comments
Plant: We went back to Townes [Van Zandt] again and I think the very last thing he put on tape was a song called Harm’s Swift Way and in our Band of Joy album which followed Raising Sand we took that song and turned it upside down into some sort of country piece. We tried to lighten it a bit, in homage to him, I’m sure he didn’t need any homage because he had his own life for better or worse, you know? Yet, to visit these kinds of songs, which bearing in mind came from an era in which I didn’t know half of these people and when I started looking into it, I realized that so much of it was so deep. As much as we are all showmen and we can get up and sing songs – when people write songs that got this kind of intensity and abstraction, they leave you absolutely floored. This is because you do spend the rest of your life or however long you think about this song trying to figure out: “Well, was he referring to this or that?” It’s great. The whole abstraction of the song is crucial, I think.
Co-Host: The ambiguity.
Plant: Yeah, yeah it’s really quite something. Now sometimes, now and again, down the line, somebody who is a particular writer for a particular piece draws the blinds back a little bit and you go: “Ohh” a little bit but of course, they could be fooling themselves. They are probably fooling just for the sake of it. I’ve written songs that I don’t even know what they are about myself.
