"It's the most prolific and free-thinking bunch of guys that I've worked with. It's a very fluent, and, I suppose, light-footed assembly of spirits, really, and it just dances through everything."
Robert Plant, participating in a conference call with a number of Canadian media outlets, spoke of his band, the Sensational Space Shifters. They're his collaborators on a tripping new album of free-rock, trance-blues and intercontinental adventures. Set for release on Sept. 9, lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar is Plant's first record since 2010's Band of Joy, which followed 2007's winning Americana collaboration with Alison Krauss, Raising Sand.
"Maybe it's time that's done this, or maybe it's a sense of maturity or experience, travel or other cultures," Plant explained, speaking about his open-minded genre-blending that also revisits his former band and halcyon golden-god days. The industrial-grimed Malian-vibed track Pocketful of Golden reuses an old Led Zeppelin line, about a sun that refuses to shine. And Poor Howard is a radical reworking of the Huddie Ledbetter's blues Po' Howard. Zeppelin, of course, had a history of blues appropriation, but not with the nuance applied now.
"I've stopped shouting at it," Plant said, about his relationship with traditional blues.
Stopped shouting? Has the man who battle-cried Immigrant Song mellowed? "The best thing is, is to pillage and to take the stuff of value and turn it and twist it and craft it," said Plant, who once sang about coming from the land of the ice and snow, and from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow.
Good to hear it, then. Plant, recently turned 66, still pillages. His marauding, though, is so much more refined.