This is a key piece of music for me. I listened to it a lot when I first started getting into Zeppelin, so when I was 14 or 15. It’s amazing to think that they had only broken up four years earlier when I was buying these records. They seemed from another era even in 1984. Once I started driving I had a tape called Led Zeppelin Selections and it never left my car. I listened to that cassette a few years ago and it still played but it was stretched and everything sounded slow, which wasn’t such a terrible thing. This track was on my Zep mix and I used to crank it in my canary yellow 1978 Cutlass Cruiser station wagon, alongside “Kashmir” and “Over the Hills And Far Away”.
I’m going to say it this was the first instrumental that I obsessed over. There had been instrumental hits like “Popcorn” and “The Hustle” that I liked, but I just listened to and enjoyed them, I didn’t stop to think how they worked. But this track, “Bron-Yr-Aur”, a solo feature for 12-string acoustic played by Jimmy Page, seemed “deep” to me. It went beyond just being pretty, even though it was that, too. I would listen and think about how during the section that more or less serves as the “chorus,” Page plays a descending series of chords that sounds slightly ominous and creates a feeling of tension, and then he inverts them, which releases the tension and sounds, to me, hopeful. The music itself created a mini narrative with a conflict and resolution.
This is the third or fourth song I’ve ever bought on my iPhone. It cost $1.29, which is highway robbery—it’s only two minutes long. You can buy a television show for that. So I am posting about it here to get my money’s worth.
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