![]() ![]() “It begins with the concept of trying to have something would unravel in layers as the song progressed. Today, he talks about the song with unbridled enthusiasm, losing himself in his words. “I don’t want to tell you about it in case it doesn’t come off,” he told NME in April 1970, “it’s an idea for a really long track on the next album … we want to try something new with the organ and acoustic guitar building up and building to the electric thing.” Page had decided he wanted an epic song for the fourth album more than 18 months before its eventual release in November 1971. In other words, if you were looking for the ur-song of classic rock, for something combining incredible popularity, a huge selection of myths, and a faint sense of preposterousness, then your search can begin and end with Stairway to Heaven. It’s also become mocked for being a monument of pretension, described by rock critic Lester Bangs as “a thicket of misbegotten mush”. It’s been voted on to scores of lists of the greatest songs of all time it was claimed on its 20th anniversary in 1991 that it had been played 2,874,000 times on the radio, amounting to 44 years’ worth of airtime it’s been suggested that if you play it backwards you’ll hear Satanic messages, including “Here’s to my sweet Satan,” though the dark lord clearly didn’t anticipate downloads ruining his ploy to brainwash credulous youth. In the intervening 43 years, Hughes’s reaction has been shared by generation after generation of teenagers, kids who learn how to play Jimmy Page’s acoustic guitar intro, who pore over Robert Plant’s lyrics. This idea of two paths is personified in the song by the woman, entitled, who thinks she can “buy” a stairway to heaven, who thinks all that glitters is “gold” and who believes, sings Plant, If the stores are all closed / With a word she can get what she came for.“He plays me the entire record and it comes to Stairway to Heaven, and of course I’m only 19 years old, and I’m thinking: ‘Bloody hell, this is earth-shattering.’” Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long runĪnd there’s still time to change the road you’re on Page said a large amount of the lyrics were written there, written on a pad by Plant as Page strummed. The lyrics, though, began spontaneously when Page and Plant played the song next to a fire at Headley Grange. The song eventually came together via different segments Page had on a tape recorder. Page said, according to a 2000 article in MOJO, that the music for “Stairway to Heaven” was written “over a long period, the first part coming at Born-Yr-Aur one night” (quote via Ultimate Guitar). In fact, the song began in 1970 when Page and Plant were staying at Bron-Yr-Aur, a cottage in Wales while they were working on their third album. It harkens to Celtic songs that the band loved so much. ![]() The music begins with a picked guitar line, which is met with recorders played by Jones. At the time, “Stairway to Heaven” became the most requested song on FM radio, despite the fact that the band never officially released it as a commercial single.įeaturing Plant on vocals, Jimmy Page on guitar, John Paul Jones on bass and other instruments, and John Bonham on drums, the song builds and builds until a big rock crescendo. Recorded at the end of 1970 in London, the song was included on Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. ![]()
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