By now, Plant's voice had become an instrument of breathy intimacy.
Robert Plant entered the new millennium with an album that looked defiantly backward – not to Led Zeppelin, mind you, but to a round-up of his personal musical heroes. The grunge-era Manic Nirvana (1990) and Fate of Nations (1993) had already junked the overegged synth-rock of Plant's 80s albums – while 1995's Unledded reunion with Jimmy Page breathed new life into the Zeppelin catalogue – but Dreamland definitively set Sir Percival on the Americana-rooted course he has steered ever since.
There was a distant clue in Fate of Nations' If I Were a Carpenter. Nine years on from that Tim Hardin cover, Plant opted to pay homage to such American cult figures as Tim Rose (Morning Dew), Tim Buckley (Song to the Siren), Moby Grape's Skip Spence (Skip's Song), and the Youngbloods' Jesse Colin Young (Darkness, Darkness). Additionally, he tipped a wink to Dylan (Desire's One More Cup of Coffee) and – on a spooky, jagged cover of Hey Joe – to both Hendrix and Love's Arthur Lee.
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Source: BBC Music