Why ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’: The Led Zeppelin song Jimmy Page called “trance music”

Surprisingly, Robert Plant was never a huge fan of the Led Zeppelin track ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’. It was less the song as a whole that he had a problem with, and more his vocal performance that he hated. “Songs like ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’… I find my vocals on there horrific now,” he said, “I really should have shut the fuck up!”

Whenever I’m trying to sell Led Zeppelin to someone who isn’t convinced they’re the best band in the world, I bring to their attention the extraordinary diversity that exists within the band. The sound that they managed to make was a combination of so many different genres, and they managed to still sound cohesive and as a unit when making it.

Robert Plant’s singing is key to this unique aspect of the band, as he needed to adjust his vocal tone depending on the style of music being played. If they were going for more of an acoustic feel, he had to sing sweetly and softly; however, when the distortion is turned up to the max, he needs to turn on the grit and deliver a more screeching performance.

Personally, I believe one of the best examples of this versatility is contained within ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, so it’s a shame that Plant isn’t a fan of the track. Jimmy Page, on the other hand, would back me up, as he has spoken previously about how his attitude to music is perfectly reflected in the trance-like element of this song.

Thanks to the different styles of guitar music he learnt growing up, paired with how much studio work he did when he played with various different bands and artists, Jimmy Page experimented with various other styles when he eventually started making music with Led Zeppelin. He bent boundaries when it came to the strict rules that surrounded what would constitute as rock music, and in turn, created something new and exciting in the process. You can hear all of this in ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, as Page himself admits.

“That whole aspect of the fingerstyle playing and what people sort of think of as folk guitar, but also the aspect of […] it’s like trance music really came from the riffs from the Chicago, Howlin’ Wolf, this sort of thing,” said Page, “All those things as well. So you get like this hybrid really of blues music and folk music and rockabilly. It’s all in there.”

The guitarist continued, “Modern classic is there too. My appreciation of Indian music and Arabic music and all this stuff was there before I even did sessions. But now I’ve got a chance to really just keep expanding all these ideas, you know?”

If you’re still not sold on Led Zeppelin being one of the best bands that there is, go listen to one of their albums in full and make a note of all the different styles of music you hear throughout. For a band making music in the ‘60s and ‘70s to be so fearless when it came to bending genres and refusing to be specifically attached to one genre was unprecedented, and their influence is yet to be touched decades later.