Quick: What is Led Zeppelin’s most famous hit, “Stairway to Heaven,” actually about?
In the nearly 41 years since Zeppelin’s epic eight-minute opus was released, there’ve been plenty of attempts at interpreting the cryptic lyrics penned by the English band’s frontman, Robert Plant. If you Google the phrase “‘Stairway to Heaven’ lyrics interpretation,” you can spend a good bit of time perusing the Web’s 74,000 or so responses.
The song begins by—it would seem—critiquing a materialistic woman’s love affair with having more and more stuff: “There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold/And she’s buying a stairway to heaven/When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed/With a word she can get what she came for/Ooh, ooh, and she’s buying a stairway to heaven.”
After that, things get a bit more opaque as Plant contrasts this woman’s apparent avariciousness with a variety of images taken from the natural world. What those lines mean is open to a variety of interpretations.
And that brings me to the reason I’m writing about this four-decade-old song today: It turns out that even Robert Plant himself isn’t exactly sure what the song is about.
In an interview addressing the possibility of another reunion of Led Zeppelin’s surviving members—they last played together in 2007, the first time they’d done so in 27 years—Plant also talked about the fact he’s not quite comfortable singing some of the band’s lyrics anymore, especially those from “Stairway to Heaven.” The 64-year-old singer recently told the Associated Press, “I struggle with some lyrics for particular periods of time.” As for the words to the band’s most recognizable song, he said, “Maybe I’m still trying to work out what I was talking about.”
I think there’s a lesson here.
As Plugged In’s music guy, I spend a lot of time each week listening to and trying to interpret the lyrics of the songs and albums we review. I go into that process with a question in the back of my mind that a Shakespeare professor drilled into me in college: “What’s going on here?” With each artist’s music, I look for clues that will help me determine the meaning (or, at times, meanings) of the lyrics I’m listening to.
Admittedly, there’s an inescapable degree of subjectivity involved with this endeavor. Still, I generally work under the assumption that an artist means something and intends to communicate specific messages through the words that he or she has chosen. I assume, in most cases, that there’s something to be gleaned.
It’s not always possible to easily glean much of anything from a song, of course. Some bands in particular practically seem to delight in dishing up inscrutability, playing with words in a way that resists this straightforward interpretive approach. (Chevelle comes to mind.)
Sometimes, such as the case of “Stairway to Heaven,” it turns out even the artist himself isn’t sure what his song actually means. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it seriously or give up on considering the impact a song’s ideas and images might potentially have on those who listen to it.
Words have meaning. They matter … even if the original artist isn’t quite sure why.
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