Some of the best musicians in the game tend to see their craft almost like a competition. Even though it would be easy to quote what’s in your heart and play what you feel, it’s sometimes fun to have someone as a target and see whether or not you can match them or make something that has the same staying power as one of their classic hits. Despite Robert Plant having a hand in some of the greatest Led Zeppelin songs ever made, he held up his hand and said that he came nowhere close to this wordsmith’s masterpiece.
Listening back to Plant’s way with words, though, he always felt more attuned to the power of his voice rather than the Bob Dylan-esque lyrics half the time. On a track like ‘Whole Lotta Love’, there are moments where he may as well be riffing on different words, but it hardly matters when he starts to channel that true ‘Percy’ register and reaches the high notes that even Janis Joplin would have a hard time hitting.
Even by folk rock standards, though, there was still a lot to choose from. Dylan was the obvious start for most people, but coming through the other geniuses in the field, it wasn’t hard to see someone latch onto Joan Baez’s breathtaking voice, Joni Mitchell’s unconventional approach to guitar tunings, or even Cat Stevens’s sentimental tunes. All of them had their quirk, but Leonard Cohen hit you in the heart with pure lyrical passion.
While most people know Cohen more for his celebrated songs like ‘Suzanne’ and ‘Hallelujah’, some of his best material was about him trying to break the conventions of typical love songs. Everyone had heard the simple ‘I love you’ chorus hook every day, so hearing him talk about relationships on the rocks or people dealing with their own personal demons was like reconnecting with an old friend who had gone through their fair share of rough periods in life.
Zeppelin were pretty far removed from that kind of folk tradition, but Plant knew that there was something special about the song ‘Bird On The Wire’, saying, “I’m listening to Leonard Cohen going, ‘Fuck me, these lyrics!’ Where do you go from ‘Bird On The Wire’? How can I get anywhere near that? It’s certainly got nothing to do with squeezing any lemons anyway! You know what I mean?”
Granted, Plant might not want to discount all of his lyrics due to ‘Bird On The Wire’. Cohen’s lowly tale might be enough to leave everyone mesmerised, but compared with ‘The Lemon Song,’ both of them seem to serve two different purposes for their audiences, especially those looking to jam in a sweaty blues club. And let’s not forget Plant’s ethereal lyrics on tracks like ‘No Quarter’ or ‘Going to California’ during his prime.
However, Plant never saw his work as inferior to Cohen’s. They were always going to be two different pieces of rock and roll history, but when measured as pure poetry, there’s no getting around Cohen’s genius.