Led Zeppelin’s renowned song, “Stairway to Heaven,” was released in the latter part of 1971. Jimmy Page, the band’s guitarist, and Robert Plant, its lead singer, wrote the song.
The song is famed for its legendary guitar solo and mysterious lyrics, which have been interpreted in different ways.
Others interpret the song as a metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment, while some think it is about the ascent to paradise.
“Stairway To Heaven” was and still is the biggest classic rock song of all time by Led Zeppelin. The utter thrill you get by hearing this music is indescribable. It can make you uncomfortable to listen to it.
The guitarist is without a doubt among the greatest to have ever taken up an instrument, and he is responsible for some of the greatest solos and riffs of all time.
He had already established himself as one of Britain’s most renowned guitarists before joining Led Zeppelin, having gained notoriety with The Yardbirds, and every band in the nation aspired to hire him as a session musician.
The song “Stairway to Heaven” is proof of Page’s unchanging artistic vision and is a composition that only he could have written.
The song’s components all fit together seamlessly. The guitarist once described what was going through his head when he wrote the iconic song; it is still eight minutes of pure compositional genius.
He told BBC, “I wanted to put something together which started with quite a fragile, exposed guitar, As far as the instrumentation goes, there are recorders in the early part which give it a slightly medieval feel. That was an idea of John Paul-Jones to put the recorders on, and he played them. When I first had the idea for ‘Stairway’, that wasn’t what I was thinking, and I was thinking more about the texture of the electric piano.”
He added, “The idea of ‘Stairway’ was to have a piece of music, a composition, whereby it would just keep on unfolding into more layers, more moods. The subtlety of the intensity and the overlay of the composition would actually accelerate as it went through on every level, every emotional level, every musical level, so it just keeps opening up as it continues through its passage.”
Now, on how he wrote the lyrics of the song. Someone allegedly took control of his hand, causing him to suddenly begin penning lyrics. Whoa.
That is really insane. And it’s somewhat unsettling. In this interview, Jimmy Page discusses the composition of “Stairway to Heaven” and describes how the song came to be.
On writing lyrics, he said, “We were routining Stairway To Heaven and it was tricky going through it without having any verses to it. And while were going through it and everyone was learning it, Robert [Plant] was writing lyrics in the same room on his pad. And he eventually came to the mike and started singing, and it was, like, ‘Wow, we’re really onto something here, cos his lyrics are superb on it.”
