Robert Plant – Dreamland

It’s a strange new world when Dolly Parton sings “Stairway to Heaven” and Robert Plant does an album of Tim Buckley, Tim Rose, Bob Dylan, Jesse Colin Young, and Bukka White tunes. But it’s a good world. Plant’s astute vocal musicianship gave Led Zeppelin its singular layer of refinement. Now 54, Plant possesses a seriousness of artistic purpose and a fan-like infatuation with great songs of all eras, allowing him to recast the material on Dreamland with imagination and subtlety.

It begins with a great roaring adaptation of a Bukka White song, all bravado drums and brazen guitars. But “Funny In My Mind (I Believe I’m Fixin’ To Die)” is not the British blooz Led Zep helped invent; it’s more like Celtic metal with a touch of North African bluegrass.

Dylan’s “One More Cup Of Coffee” has Moroccan modalities, flamenco flair, an air of Mediterranean back alleys where tourists never go. Keyboard player John Baggott arranges the strings on “Morning Dew”, in which Plant tunes his voice so that it merges and disappears into the thick orchestral sounds.

Tim Buckley’s gossamer “Song To The Siren” sounds as ethereal as a misty mountain myth. The seductively-sung “Darkness Darkness” doesn’t take too many liberties with the Youngbloods’ depiction of clinical depression as the postscript to the Summer of Love. A risky “Hey Joe” synergizes Hendrix’s hallucinatory virtuosity and Arthur Lee’s defiant resignation. Plant leaves his fingerprint on the song by a kind of vocal method acting, melodramatic yet real as young Brando doing Tennessee Williams.

The two originals have their own smart touches. “Red Dress” evokes a bar fight in the Howlin’ Wolf Saloon, while “Last Time I Saw Her” finds Plant channeling Little Willie John and singing along with his hologram.

Dreamland is ambitious, yet it never exceeds Plant’s reach; he takes familiar songs down roads they’ve never traveled, but still gets them home with all the substantial power and finesse at his command.