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Tue 30 September 2025 16:30, UK
Jack Black really had a point when he said that the only way you can listen to Led Zeppelin is by going through their entire catalogue at once…
When he was giving a speech about the band, the movie star, rock star, and rebel, famed for sticking it to the man, didn’t hold back his love for Zeppelin. “Led Zeppelin… the greatest rock and roll band of all time,” said Black. “Better than The Beatles, better than The Stones. And if you don’t agree with me, that’s because you haven’t done the Zeppelin marathon. It’s when you sit your ass down and listen to all nine Zeppelin albums in a row. The jams of Led Zeppelin are second to none.”
Led Zeppelin were a rock band, sure, that might technically be an accurate way to describe them, but they did so much more than that. When you listen to their music, you are truly shown how ridiculous it is for bands to set boundaries on what should be celebrated as a boundaryless genre. Led Zeppelin take big rock songs, but inject them with various elements of music from different movements in order to expand the genre.
“I had a lot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performance, and I started building a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin,” explained Page. “I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses – a combination that had never been done before… Lots of light and shade in the music.”
If you listen to Led Zeppelin’s music all the way through, you begin to appreciate these different elements a lot more. Whether you’re listening to their debut album or the last one they ever recorded, their sound is one completely packed with versatility, which is fun to hear and also helps to expand your mind, exposing you to different elements and combinations of music which you probably didn’t know could work before.
Of course, the downside to having such a barrage of great music is that a lot of songs get overlooked. We all know the Led Zeppelin classics, as they’re tracks which have truly managed to stand the test of time. People adore songs such as ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Ramble On’ and ‘Stairway To Heaven’, to the extent that they’re a lot of the first songs people learn when they pick up a guitar. However, there are also a lot of great Led Zeppelin songs that get overlooked because of the plentiful array of hits at your disposal. There are a vast number of tracks to choose from when it comes to Zeppelin songs which are underrated, but one of the biggest is ‘In My Time of Dying’.
I’m not sure why we don’t talk about this song as much as we should, but I assume it’s because the track is sandwiched between classics on the band’s 1975 record Physical Graffiti. Some of the band’s biggest tracks are found on the first half of this record alongside ‘In My Time of Dying’, including ‘Custard Pie’, ‘Houses of the Holy’ and ‘Kashmir’, all of which are widely considered classics.
‘In My Time of Dying’ shows off an element of Zeppelin which is often overlooked, which is their exciting use of rhythm. This song builds up and breaks down sporadically throughout, as there are periods of hard rock and silence mixed together, all of which contribute to a relatively haphazard mixture of sounds that you don’t often come across in other music. On top of that, the way that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s vocals sync up with one another is truly inspiring, as they combine their individual sounds to create a strange kind of rock-oriented harmony.
Having a plethora of great songs is a double-edged sword, as while you cement yourself as a band for the ages, you also run the risk of great songs getting overlooked in your mass of excellence. This is what happened to Zeppelin and their hit, ‘In My Time of Dying’.
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