Outside of a handful of “reunion” appearances with Led Zeppelin, rock icon Robert Plant has spent the last 34 years forging his own musical path influenced by the Mississippi Delta, West Africa and beyond. But for his latest album lullaby and…The Ceaseless Roar Plant returned to his stomping grounds near the Welsh border.

“I think it was time to come back to the misty mountains,” Plant said. “That’s basically what the whole kind of lyrical lean is, it’s about coming back and digging in again, using a lot of traces to be found in Britain as opposed to what might be found in North America.”;
“My home was somewhere I visited maybe once every three or four months for about two or three days. So I made up my mind it was time to come back. My dog was getting hungry and needed to be fed.”
The new album sees Plant with the Sensational Space Shifters, a seasoned collection of musicians who shine on the lead single “Rainbow,” the sweet ballad “A Stolen Kiss” and the folksy-fusion opener “Little Maggie.”
“It’s the most prolific and free-thinking bunch of guys that I’ve worked with,” Plant says of his band. “Maybe it’s an era or a sense of maturity, travel, other cultures, playing through West Africa with the Tuareg into Morocco across and into Mississippi. It’s a very fluid and light-footed assembly of spirits really and it just dances through everything.”
Plant also wrote more for this album than his previous two albums, 2010’s Band Of Joy with Patty Griffin and 2007’s critically acclaimed Raising Sand with Alison Krauss.
“I guess I was scared,” he said regarding writing. “I didn’t know how to pick the lock that opened the door that gave me this record. And now the door is open and everything is flowing beautifully.”
He also cites working with Krauss and Griffin (whom Plant dated briefly until breaking up in 2013) as being an indirect influence on this record. Both projects were “unusual for me and unusual for them.”
“Artistically I love relationships and friendships and I’m not very good at keeping them but I’m besotted by them,” he said. “I guess what I did was I spent a lot of time travelling using music as my source of comfort. And it’s taken me to these various places with various people.”
And while grateful for his fans, he isn’t placating them with the adventurous, exploratory sounds on lullaby and…The Ceaseless Roar or reinventing warhorses from his Led Zeppelin days.
“I can re-adapt, I can revisit a career that’s pretty long now,” Plant says. “Some people get a little negative about it but I have a good time. And I see the way people like Neil Young work and the guys that have been around for a while and do the same thing. I think that’s the place to come from, just keep reinventing. You’ve got to knock yourself out before you try to knock anybody else out.”

A brief North American tour sees Plant playing Toronto’s Massey Hall in September but a more extensive North American jaunt is planned for next May.
“I’m really proud of the record, it’s full of life and full of joy but it’s also reflective,” Plant said. “And that’s really where a guy at my time in life should be.”

Don’t believe him? Find out for yourself and listen to the new album NOW!