Robert Plant finds his 'Saving Grace'

“I said, ‘Ahmet, you know, don’t you? You know. You know.’ It was very all those days of, ‘oh my God, look at his hair. He’s got a mullet.’ All that stuff.”

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ROBERT Plant with his band for the album “Saving Grace.” They are touring in the U.S. and England.

(Todd Oldham)

Quietly, Plant says, “See, the thing is, I wasn’t too old at the end. You know, when John [Bonham] passed away, yeah, I wasn’t too old to, you know, to go the wrong way. I was still young enough to keep moving.

“And somehow, in a way, in the memory of he and I, when we were young, before and during Zeppelin, we were what we call in England, ‘Chancers.’ [opportunists]. So I thought, yeah, I'm carrying on. I’m going now. And I take a bit of him with me most places, really.

“Because, you know, the stack heels are long gone. So what was it going to do? I was going to just do what the hell I wanted to do,” Plant says. “And these people came along with me, and that’s what we've got. But you know [with ‘Saving Grace’] we've stepped over the margin. Now I've carried the bride across the threshold.”

Much of the album’s emotional tone is poignant, which makes the collection feel a part of an unending cycle of connection. Timeless but timely, pure and apt for this fraught and divisive time in history.

“Within us all, as this little group of people who come out from an unexpected corner, especially this time in my being ... That feeling that you get, not when you look to the West,” Plant says, with a slight chuckle at his own lyrical reference, “but this one; we've found this thing together, and we go, ‘wow, this is great.’ So there’s a joy in the melancholia. Basically, it’s just choice of notation, the hanging on notes, which comes across much better when we play live.”