Robert Plant didn’t always want to spend his days playing the same kind of music.
Even Led Zeppelin had their days where they could mess around with songs that they didn’t know would work out or not, but it would always come back to them making tunes that pushed the boundaries of what they could do every single time they played. The name of the game was always about giving your all every single time one of the songs came up, but Plant knew that he didn’t need to be playing up the role of the ‘Golden God’ for the rest of his life, either.
And by the time that John Bonham passed away, Plant was bound to be going in different directions. He wasn’t going to go back to making the same style of rock and roll after losing a dear friend like that, and when you go back and listen to those early records, he wanted to do absolutely everything he could to make a record that was ahead of the curve. He didn’t always succeed, but you have to give him props for trying.
Pictures at Eleven did have some decent tunes on it, and Now and Zen was him experimenting with more exotic sounds, but no one could have expected the kind of move he would have made with Alison Krauss. She was one of the greatest singers in the world of folk and bluegrass, and even if Plant had a few acoustic tunes in Zeppelin, Raising Sand was like giving him a whole second career as a folk star.
But that part of his sound never fully went away, either. He had spent years working with his own bands long before Zeppelin had started, and from the first time he opened his mouth, he was still into the hippie folk scene. He would eventually become more entrenched in blues whenever he made a new record, but there were so many opportunities for him to work with new people every single time that he worked with The Band of Joy.
Because as much as people like their favourite bands to stay together, The Band of Joy was more like a musical family than anything else. There were moments where not everybody had to be on a specific record or anything, but when they all came back together, they always seemed to gel perfectly with everything that their colleagues were doing. And as far as Plant could tell, this was the kind of band that he loved being in the most.
It’s that flexibility that made things exciting, and Plant had the opportunity to make some of his more heartfelt material with the band later on in his career, saying, “I think I’ve really found the home of the heart with these people. And the project itself could be quite amorphous, really. The Band Of Joy is and has to be exactly that. So one day we add somebody to it, or somebody goes off somewhere and does something fast, maybe somebody else will come in. It doesn’t have to be hard and fast.”
The idea of a band carrying on like that might seem strange, but it actually might have saved a good few bands during their career. Any group of musicians is going to need space away from each other, and if a band like The Beatles had been able to take a break from each other and come back every now and again to make a record, we could have had so much more classics to choose from today.
What The Band of Joy was doing seemed to be ahead of the curve at the time, but even for a band as tight knit as Zeppelin, Plant knew that the best bands didn’t need to have the same kind of loyalty. It was all about being able to play among friends and enjoy yourself, and everything Plant did came back to him having the best time with his bandmates.