Robert Plant Admitted His Fear of Missing Notes Resulted in His Classic Onstage Pose
Robert Plant’s main job in Led Zeppelin shows was to get onstage and make sure he hit all the notes. Given the range required for many of their songs, this wasn’t always an easy task. As a result, Plant had to find ways to make singing easier for him. He said that one of his classic onstage poses was a direct result of his fear that he might miss a note.
Robert Plant said he worried about hitting notes
On his podcast Digging Deep, Plant addressed the way he would arch his back while singing. He noted that singers do it to open their chest up, but he was mostly concerned that he would miss a note.
“I often did it like that because I didn’t really know whether I could hit the right peckin’ note!” he told host Matt Everitt, per Ultimate Classic Rock.
He thought it would be safer to get as far away from the microphone as possible. That way, if he missed a note, it might not be as loudly noticeable to the audience.
“I’ll go as far away from the microphone just in case it’s not very good!” he said. “Because you don’t know sometimes.”
He noted that he valued his collaboration with Alison Krauss because he didn’t have to wail out high notes nearly as often.
“It’s going to be good with Alison because I can be quite restrained until there’ll be two or three or four points in the show where it’ll really kick off,” he said. “When that happens, her ribcage opens up — when you push the button she lets it go. It’s great.”
He named the song he found most difficult to sing
Led Zeppelin songs would be difficult for many singers to take on, but Plant said the song that posed the biggest challenge to him was one from his solo career. He said “Polly Come Home,” which he sang with Krauss on their album Raising Sand, was the most difficult song for him.
“It’s just the most difficult piece of music to sing at the tempo that we sang it at,” he said, per Louder Sound. “It’s one of the toughest calls I’ve had, apart from my audition in the Yardbirds.”
The challenge had to do with the song’s languid tempo and the control he had to exercise as a result.
“The song itself is just, it’s so poignant. And it’s so slow,” he said. “So the very opening line of the song, in my chest, my lungs, my vocal cords, in my sense of timing … It was, ‘How am I gonna get these words right to the end of that bar without collapsing?’ It was just such a beautiful lilt.”
Robert Plant’s concerns about hitting notes might dampen hopes of a Led Zeppelin reunion
Plant has admitted that the type of singing he was able to do on Led Zeppelin records is no longer a possibility for him.
“I know that the full, open-throated falsetto that I was able to concoct in 1968 carried me through until I was tired of it,” he said, per NME. “Then that sort of exaggerated personality of vocal performance morphed and went somewhere else.”
Plant covers Led Zeppelin songs with relative frequency in performances, even successfully performing “Immigrant Song” in 2019. Still, delivering this type of performance night after night would be incredibly difficult. Plant already seems uninterested in a Led Zeppelin reunion; the prospect of also having to push his voice to its limits every night likely makes it even less appealing to him.
