The art of songwriting will always be different for anyone who puts pen to paper for the first time.

While it’s easy to slave over getting the right wording of a certain line, the best moments come from when people are jamming together and a piece of musical magic pops out of the mix. Jimmy Page knew the importance of capturing that magic better than anyone when sculpting Led Zeppelin’s masterpieces, but Robert Plant felt that a song had to move someone physically to be considered a classic.

When listening to Zeppelin’s early records, Plant wouldn’t have made something if it didn’t have the same passion he had heard from his favourite blues artists.

This was meant to be a heavier version of what The Yardbirds were supposed to be, so if they sang songs like ‘For Your Love’, ‘Percy’ was going to make sure a song like ‘How Many More Times’ came blaring out of the speakers the minute that he opened his mouth.

But Zeppelin were never completely satisfied with being a simple blues-rock outfit.

There were many facets to what they could do, and going through their discography, it’s easy to see them either twisting the blues into different shapes or making strange tunes that didn’t seem to have any real genre behind them, like the orchestral swell of ‘Kashmir’ or the ethereal sounds on ‘The Rain Song’.

That doesn’t come from people who were always listening to blues.

Page had been keeping his ear close to the ground when it came to Eastern music, John Paul Jones was already a veteran of the session scene, and John Bonham had always been subtly throwing in some R&B grooves into the mix, whether it was blasting Hall and Oates in his spare time or taking a few cues from Bernard Purdie.

But Plant’s tastes drew him back to the kind of crooners that lit a fire under him before he even took up singing.

Then again, there were bound to be limits on good and bad crooning.

There were always people like Pat Boone who sanitised every single song they touched, but whenever Plant returned to his roots, he always remembered Mario Lanza singing the song ‘Serenade’ as being the first time he had a visceral reaction listening to music.

It definitely wasn’t on the same level as someone like Howlin’ Wolf or Chuck Berry, but Plant was still got that same rush whenever he heard the tune later in his career, saying, “It’s so evocative and it carries so much presence and beauty and it just lifts — the crescendos there are.

I started looking at something that I would say wouldn’t be the runaway train.

It would be something that made me just stop and feel the goosebumps.

And this was the first song that did that to me.”

And while most of this song is miles different from what Plant would end up doing, there are subtle tricks that he took with him into his solo career.

There’s the occasional lift in the track when Lanza soars above everything else, and even if Plant found a way to open his voice up a lot more, that sense of dynamics in a song is why he was able to make something as soft and tender as ‘Tangerine’ and then go immediately to ‘Communication Breakdown’ whenever they played live.

Although Plant has turned the banshee screams off for the past few years as he works with people like Allison Krauss, his downtempo material has also allowed him to explore Lanza’s range a little bit more.

He wasn’t bound for the crooning circuit by any stretch, but the subtleties that come with being a great singer are all accounted for, whether he’s doing ‘Dazed and Confused’ or ‘The Battle of Evermore’.