(Credits: Far Out / Open Culture)
Thu 6 November 2025 18:45, UK
Led Zeppelin didn’t want to be the kind of pop group that everyone else was during the 1970s.
There was certainly room for the medium to grow, and while Jimmy Page could write some fantastic tunes, it was much better for him to release the songs on albums and not worry about whether they had a landmark single or anything. But when looking through his own discography, he knew that certain songs commanded more attention than others on the track listing.
Because, really, is there any conceivable way of listening to their fourth record and not bask in the glory of ‘Stairway to Heaven’? The whole thing sounds monumental, and while it’s completely understandable why an eight-minute-long musical journey wasn’t released as a single, that hasn’t stopped the classic rock stations of today from playing it on repeat alongside the likes of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Hotel California’.
That may have been their crowning achievement, but Zeppelin were about more than making epic tales every time they played. Page liked to stretch himself whenever he went into the studio, and while that did lead to a few strange moments across their records, it was always about serving his muse instead of worrying about whatever the hell was going on on the charts. But if there was one common thread between their albums, it was the blues.
Despite leaving The Yardbirds, Page never lost his love of the blues, and while he used that to birth hard rock on tunes like ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘Whole Lotta Love’, there was also a different avenue for him to work in whenever they made their blues jams. ‘How Many More Times’ is more firmly indebted to the blues, but hearing them transform a song like ‘When the Levee Breaks’ is a lot heavier than most people would have ever imagined the tune could be.
But looking through all of the band’s bluesy moments, Page knew that the core of their genius came from them performing ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’, saying, “I would have brought people’s attention to ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’, no doubt about it, because nobody had actually approached blues up that point like that. Everybody was playing blues but nobody had gone that sort of extra mile.”
All of the basic blues aesthetics are there, but whereas the last half of a song like ‘Heartbreaker’ was about Page taking a solo, the entire track feels like he’s having a conversation with the listener through his guitar. And when they managed to perform it live, it took on a different character every single night depending on how Page was feeling that day. It could be mournful or it could be angry, but no one could deny the feeling behind it.
There are even a few pieces of the song that seem to predict where they would be going a few years later. Not everyone was looking to play this kind of blues forever, and while this song ‘Loving You’ is far more simple, there are the early makings of what would become tunes like ‘Achilles Last Stand’ in here as well, especially with the way that Page uses the guitar as an emotional tool half the time.
Even though it’s easy for people to fall in love with Zeppelin based on their more celebrated hits like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ is the song that would make people firmly understand their approach. They had the bones of the blues in them, but what their music did was about taking the genre to the kind of heights that most people thought were impossible.
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