Credit: Robert Plant
October 29th, 2026 · 5:30pm GMT
Robert Plant has always been used to making songs that were much more concerned with something greater than rock and roll.
Sure, Led Zeppelin was always going to have a core piece of rock and roll history to them thanks to Jimmy Page, but when you look through the kinds of tunes that they were working on at the time, there was still that same mystical quality that you wouldn’t have found in their music were it not for Plant singing everything. He was a child of the hippie movement, and he didn’t suddenly forget those ideals once the amps started getting bigger.
If anything, he was going to turn that style up every now and again. The biggest tunes that the band ever made were all about music that was greater than themselves, and even though they were doing everything they could to push themselves, there were still instances where they couldn’t really work on one song that only had to do with the typical angles of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
That’s the reason why ‘Living Loving Maid’ never landed in Plant’s mind, and some of the best tunes that he would go on to make got even more esoteric. He wanted to make tunes that people would remember forever, and even though ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was something that he never fully connected with, there was a lot more going on for him when he started working on tunes like ‘Kashmir’.
That was the kind of symphonic epic that he felt they should be making as rock and roll legends, but there was always room for more downtempo affairs as well. Page still loved his acoustic guitar better than most, and while Plant tried his best to make a bunch of tunes that managed to leave a hole in people’s hearts on tracks like ‘Going to California’, it was nowhere near the kind of range that he heard out of Tim Buckley.
While everyone can remember his son that outshone him in the 1990s, Tim was one of the finest folk singers on the circuit, and ‘Song to A Siren’ was the kind of song that Plant couldn’t get away from. He could recognise that kind of song whenever he perked up his ears, and there’s nothing in the world that could make him resist that voice whenever Tim reached into his upper register.
This was the sound of someone completely uninhibited, and Plant wanted the chance to make music that could sound like that, saying, “Tim Buckley really influenced me when I was getting there, going to America and checking it out. The lyrics on this next song are probably some of the more beautiful I’ve ever heard in my life. This is a song called ‘Song to the Siren’.” But that didn’t always correspond to sales, though.
Further reading: From The Vault
No matter how much sway Plant seemed to have over the music industry at any given time, though, the song never seemed to gain a foothold on the charts. This Mortal Coil may have turned it into something special a few years after Buckley’s passing, but the original version of the song never managed to chart at all, with the accompanying album only making it into the upper 80s before dropping off the charts.
There was so much more potential for someone like Buckley to become one of the greats, but while we only have what he left behind, Plant knew that was more than enough. Because if you have songs like this as your template, there’s no doubt that you’re going to make something incredible when you start venturing outside of your comfort zone the same way that Buckley did.
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