Robert Plant Made My Top Ten List

`Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.`
Plato

Not that I've ever really considered a top ten list. Well, not since my basement apartment, university days with my best pal and roommate who endlessly philosophized with me.

After listening to his latest collection, "Band of Joy", I figure if I did have a top ten list, Robbie would make it. After all, any talented man is sexy right? After really pondering, I think I realistically only have a top five list after all - but that's a blog for another time.

I grew up with the likes of Paul Young, Simply Red and Boy George as musical-male influences. Led Zeppelin was something that the boys who hung out in the pool hall listened to while I was busy climbing up the stool to the penny candy counter in the 1980's. When kids my age graduated to basement parties with bootlegged tequila and home-rolled and homeg-rown ( I grew up in tobacco country) cigarettes, we were introduced to classics like Meatloaf, Lynard Skinnard and Steve Miller. Great music to take your first salty gulp of cheap tequila to and burn your lungs with your first, unfiltered deeply inhaled breath of freshly cured tobacco.

It is with this memory in my not so sub-conscience that I listened to Mr. Plant's new collection of music.  This and the memory of a great summer, open air concert a couple of years ago featuring Robert Plant, Allison Krauss, and the company of one of my best friends in the world.  Fast forward to a front row seat as a first introduction to the emotionally stoked music of Richard Thompson.

Mr. Thompson gets credit for the second song on the CD, "House of Cards". As the melody and the guitar strain in the first seconds, you fully expect Mr. Plant to break out into his Zepplinesque half-ecstasy, half-agony, melodic, scream. Instead, Mr. Plant mesmerizingly carries a uniform, controlled longing throughout the song.  

Central Two-O-Nine. Can you say blue grass, O Brother Where Art Thou?  You get the picture; "Let me hear that whistle blow/Take me back to my baby's door." Twang, twang, delightful Plant twang.

Silver Rider is haunting. The Chameleon like Plant could be a dead ringer for Robbie Roberston here with a few tweaks.  The harmony with Patty Griffen could easily be a dropped track from his 2007 collaboration with Krauss. Oil and water meet with music as the emulsifier That, and that can't-quite-put-your-finger-on-it bit of breathless lust that Plant manages to smuggle into every tune.

You Can't Buy My Love and Falling in Love Again....pretty much sum up my emotions at present about my love life. Bath soaked and beer quenched it makes me want either A - my baby back, or B - another beer. A rock 'n Roll beat to, " You can give me money, diamonds and pearls/But you can't buy my love for no money in the world."  Bop diddly do, do, do!!! I'll take option B thanks. These two songs will make you hold your head up high, walk away, and fall back in love again one right after the other. Oh, sing it Robbie my troubadour of lovin'.

Can't Buy Me Love and Cindy I'll Marry You Someday are again very much reminiscent of Plant's work with Krauss. Twangy, built lyrically and harmonically for a duet. Maybe I just wanted to, but I could almost hear Richard Thompson wrapping Cindy I'll Marry You Someday around his silken-taffy tongue, but then again Lyle Lovett could also do the tune some justice. Go figure.

The Only Sound that Matters - give this one to U2, and Bono could take it to the mainstream. Not because Bono could sing it better, just because he's more marketable to the mass MTV public.

When I read the first two lines of Monkey, "Oh my my, little white lie/I swear I'm gonna make it right this time",  I decided that perhaps I should call my therapist.  How many times have we been someone's little white lie girls? Can't tell my mother. Can't tell my sister. Can't tell my...wife!!! I loved Monkey just for the lyrics.

I had to flip to the CD pocket booklet to see if Harm's Swift Way was a little treat from Mr. Bob Dylan, but surprise, surprise....a little treat from Townes Van Zandt.  Check out the soundtrack to Crazy Heart (one of the best movies I've watched this year), track 12 - If I Needed You. What a beautiful song and statement of true friendship.  With Van Zandt's  Harm's Swift Way, as much as I love Mr. Plant's voice, and the visual I get of him hovering over the microphone in his bad-ass-rocker way, I'd love to hear Dob Dylan croak this out.

The second last, Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down conjures images of cotton fields in the early nineteenth century deep south; an August-hot, deep-south-hell-fire-and-brimstone-Baptist-Sunday-though-shalt-not-burn-in-hell-if-you-sing-loud-enough-and-someone-faints service. This song makes you want to get up, clap your hands, praise God and pray for your neighbour. 

Finally Even This Shall Pass, the final track which could easily be set to a house/rave beat; "Life is done so what is death?/Then in answer to the king/Fell a sunbeam on his ring/Blinding light through fading grey./Even this shall pass away." Nihilistic or life affirming? You decide.