“Stairway to Heaven” may be considered one of the best songs of all time, but it was written from a negative place.
Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were staying in their Welsh mountain retreat in 1970 when they laid down the groundwork for the iconic song. A year later, the duo recorded their fourth album in Hampshire when they went to the pub to work out the final version.
“I was holding a pencil and paper, and for some reason I was in a very bad mood,” Plant recalled, per Louder Sounds. “Then all of a sudden my hand was writing out the words, ‘There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold/And she’s buying a stairway to heaven…’ I just sat there and looked at the words, and then I almost leaped out of my seat.”
Page liked the lyrics so much that they became the first to be reprinted on a Zeppelin album sleeve. “The wonderful thing is that even with the lyrics in front of you, you know how you listen to something and you might not quite get what the words are but you get your own impression? With this, the lyrics were there but you still got your own impression of what the song was about. And that was really important.”
The guitarist had set his mind on adding an epic song to the band’s fourth album more than 18 months before its 1971 release. “I don’t want to tell you about it in case it doesn’t come off,” Page told NME in April 1970, “it’s an idea for a really long track on the next album … we want to try something new with the organ and acoustic guitar building up and building to the electric thing.”
But the intricate nature of “Stairway to Heaven” made the song “tricky” for the band. “The tempo changes from the beginning to the end – it’s quite radically different – but that was the intention,” Page told The Guardian in 2014.
He added: “You would find that, having been a studio musician, the one thing any trained musician will tell you you don’t do is speed up or slow down. This, as far as I could see, was in league with the whole concept of classical writing where everything is moving, moving, moving.”
