In interview, Robert Plant explains motivation guiding current studio work, and his acceptance of awards

When Robert Plant shared in the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award presented to Led Zeppelin in 2005, he ignored the honor.

But it backfired on him, and the award came to him. In a case of "you can run but you can't hide," Recording Academy President Neil Portnow tracked down Plant at the South by Southwest Festival and presented him with the award in person at a very public affair.

This elicited a curt acceptance speech from Plant, who said he could barely remember being in Led Zeppelin because so much time had passed since those days.


Plant has been nominated or awarded in at least one Grammy category in six of the past 15 years. Each time, win or lose, he has consistently snubbed the glitz of Los Angeles and the trappings of celebrity.

But not so this year. In a remarkable turnaround, he is guaranteed to show up at the ceremony two weeks from now.

That's not because he and Alison Krauss stand to rack up as many as five more awards, added to the one they shared for last year's Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals.

The reason Plant is guaranteed to show up is because he and Krauss have been booked to perform.

Pollstar relays a quote from Plant about his break from precedent this year:

"I'm looking forward to being in Los Angeles, but musically -- and spiritually -- I expect we'll be somewhere halfway between the Mississippi Delta and the Clinch Mountains."

Official word of the Plant-Krauss booking was released Thursday, one day after the airing of an interview the two gave from Nashville, where they say they are currently in pre-production for a possible follow-up album to Raising Sand.

Their interview, recorded Tuesday and broadcast the following day on Absolute Radio's "Wednesday Night Live," touches on a number of far-reaching topics, probably none more easily understandable than Plant's mindset in collecting awards.

On the night before they recorded this interview, Plant attended a Grammy party in Nashville and smiled in snapshots with current Lifetime Achievement honoree Brenda Lee, T Bone Burnett and executives of the Recording Academy's Nashville chapter. By now, Plant must be pretty used to hobnobbing at such events. After all, he and Krauss didn't spend last year doing concerts only; they were also going heavy on the award acceptance circuit. After snubbing the Grammys last February despite capturing a win in the Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals category, the duo hit up:

• the Country Music Television awards in April,
• the Mercury Prize in September,
• the Americana Music Association awards also in September,
• the Technical Excellence & Creativity Awards in October, and
  
• the Country Music Association awards in November.

At the same time, Plant was still being honored for his work signing for the single Led Zeppelin reunion concert in December 2007. He was busy touring with Krauss in the United States last June, when Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones turned up in London to accept Mojo magazine's award for Led Zeppelin as the best live act of 2007. Plant did pose in pictures alongside them, however, when the members of Led Zeppelin were named GQ's Men of the Year.

But Plant's most prestigious and noble honor of late is being named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Ben Jones asked if Plant had, for any reason, considered rejecting the honorary title assigned him by the queen of England. Plant answered that, after thinking "long and hard about it," he "reckoned that 42 years of making records" made him worthy of the honor. He has mellowed and has set aside any inclinations toward being anti-establishment or doing the "cool" thing, and just accept it.

Plant's fully elucidated response recalls a quip he made last September, when accepting GQ's top award in London. At that time, Plant said, "The thing is, when the temples get gray, the gongs start coming in thick and fast." Now, he says of his rank in the British Empire:

"It's this time of life that gongs start coming in. They're usually called lifetime achievement awards [laughing]. But, basically, somebody helps you across the street if there's a lot of traffic. ... I said to somebody, 'Well, maybe I should say, "No, I'll wait for the knighthood," for a laugh.'"

Krauss says she and Plant are in "pre-production" for a possible second album together. Plant says that for now, they're at an early stage:

"We got a whole bunch of songs and we're just going, 'Does that work?' and 'Does that work?' So, yeah, we're trying it out again."

They say they're approaching this new project with great caution, just as they had upon their first studio meeting in late 2006, to ensure that everything works to their mutual satisfaction before proceeding. Says Krauss:

"Our attitude when we were recording was, let's go in and see what it's like, and after three days, if something doesn't turn into something, then we'll say it was a nice try. I mean, I think that's what makes it surprising and interesting for Robert and myself, is that we didn't know what it was going to be like either."

Plant adds that he's "incredibly challenged by this." Elsewhere in the interview, he reveals himself as "frightened" of his own "limitations":

"She said to me about an hour ago -- we were sitting, and she said, 'What's the matter with you?' I said, 'I'm frightened by the limitations I've got in this environment.' It's quite spectacular, really."

Plant is also weary of expectations as they can only add pressure. Given the acclaim of Raising Sand by both the media and the public, along with all the awards, Plant admits he is that much more fearful of the sequel's success, saying:

"What are we gonna do? We're not going to have time to do any new stuff before it's too late! ...

"The critical -- the stuff that we've had, the acclaim and, ah -- it really doesn't bode very well for the next record, if we get that far because, I mean, people really took to it.

"But you know what? It was so genuine -- the choice of songs, the production techniques, the engineering, you know, T Bone Burnett's input -- the whole thing was just a dream and done in the shortest space of time, and it was just great, you know. It was really good.

"Of course you don't expect anything because the material isn't kind of mainstream pop, particularly ..."

Plant says he has enjoyed the freedom of employing such a trial period whenever approaching any musical project. He says it's been that way ever since his work that followed Led Zeppelin:

"I think when Led Zeppelin -- when we lost John [Bonham] in 1980, I was desperate to -- not reinstate, but do something for myself, free from the kind of shackles of people's expectations. And from that moment on, along the line ... it's not something that I think about."

He's free to pull that parachute if it's not going well. And when this came up again in the context of an answer to the inevitable Led Zeppelin reunion question, it became clear that Plant would feel this same way if approaching a reformation of his former band.

Ben Jones gave Plant a chance to address his take on why the public appetite for a Led Zeppelin reunion persists even when it is clear there will be no reunion. Plant, in his response, ignored the public perception and gave his own reasoning for not wanting to revive Led Zeppelin again. He said:

"Well, you know, the thing is -- look at it like this. The reason that it stopped was because we were incomplete, and we've been incomplete now for 28 years, and no matter what you do, you have to really guard the discretion of what you've done in the past and make sure you have all the reasons in the right place to be able to do something with absolute and total conviction.

"I mean, if my great award is to do this [sing with Alison Krauss], then I don't want to do anything that -- where I'm -- where we challenge anything we did in the first place by just going back and visiting it without having a new, fresh, make-over start.

"I mean, you only get one shot at these things, and if they're spectacular on day one, if on day 10 they aren't so good, as Alison said when we cut our -- started to make Raising Sand, we gave ourselves a deal about, if we don't get anything going in three days, let's just go out for lunch and say, 'See you later.'

"And I think the thing about it is, really, is that to visit old ground -- it's a very incredibly delicate thing to do, and the disappointment that could be there once you commit to that, and the comparisons to something that was basically fired by youth and a different kind of exuberance to now -- it's very hard to go back and meet that head on and do it justice."

This makes me wonder if Plant joined up with Page and Jones anytime last year to hear the new material Jason Bonham said they were working on and went home dissatisfied. Otherwise, I can't help but think that he didn't give them a chance to see if any further collaboration with them would prove fresh, exuberant, and enacted with "absolute and total conviction."

At any rate, Plant says working with Krauss is the award he's most proud of because:

"It's about being happy, you know. You can have a lot of gold stuff and silver stuff and whatever it is, but you end up putting them out of the way, but the achievement is really to do something I never imagined and to be schooled into getting it right. And we've both taught each other enough about swagger and precision and all that stuff, so this is a great one, really."

And as for what binds everything together that Plant has done professionally? Don't call it a career:

"For me, well, I don't have a career. I just have a bunch of great events in my life and a few dips and troughs, but this is -- I don't think I've ever had a career."