Led Zeppelin
Robert Plant later said the lyrics to "Stairway to Heaven" arrived as if his hand was writing them without him. He was sitting with the band, drawing on a book about Celtic magic he'd been reading, and the words came nearly complete in one sitting. The May Queen reference falls at exactly the halfway point of the eight-minute track, coinciding with the symbolic midpoint between spring and summer. The lyrics were reprinted on the album sleeve, the first time Led Zeppelin had ever done that, specifically so listeners could focus on what the words actually said.
In our deep dive into Stairway to Heaven, we trace the song from the Welsh cottage where it was written to the deliberate structural choices hidden inside it, and what it reveals about a band that treated rock music as a form of serious artistic construction.
