Robert Plant and my part in his renaissance: CD Review Robert Plant and the Band of Joy

For some of us, this meant trying to get into some new thing that someone had recommended, sometimes even pretending that such and such was good, but we never really felt it in our hearts.

And I don’t really blame us: for one thing, you can’t reproduce the shock-of-the-new that happens in your teenageish years when you hear everything for the first time. It stands to reason that any new music you do hear is competing against the old music, not just musically, but viscerally as well. How could it measure up?

There were exceptions, of course. Somewhere during this limbo period I came across Fiona Apple’s album Tidal, for instance, as well as a bunch of jazz and classical music that resonated in that marrow-tingling way, but even then it wasn’t quite the same.

I’m not trying to suggest that everyone’s experience of music is like this. Obviously it isn’t, and your mileage may vary. But I’m struck by how many people I know have gone through a twenty or thirty year trajectory of this nature, and who then, as I’m about to describe, arrive bewildered and delighted in the wonderful world of roots music.

That’s the thing about this next stage: it tends to happen in a manner that is both unpredictable and inevitable. That was precisely how America writer Flannery O’Connor (a Southern native, appropriately enough) described what she thought made her best stories good, and I must admit the combination of predictability and inevitability certainly does leave a satisfying feeling.

So now I go from the general to the specific.

My unpredictable moment came when I was living in the U.S. and read a review in No Depression magazine of Lucinda Williams then-new album, World Without Tears.

The real mystery in this series of events is why I was reading No Depression in the first place. I suspect I picked up a copy at the Borders near our place in DC because of something on the cover and then had a read of it in their coffee shop.

Regardless, somewhere within those pages I read the review of the Williams’ album and something it said made me risk the money and go and buy it.

Begin the revelation. And yee-ha! the revolution.

I’d heard of Williams and was vaguely familiar with some of her work, but World Without Tears cut through. It instantly roused in my middle-age self feelings similar to those Led Zep and others had in my teenage self. Her voice filled up my head and in Doug Pettibone I pretty much instantly discovered a new guitar hero. Not of the Page/Clapton/Blackmore sort, but a master nonetheless.