(Credits: Far Out / julio zeppelin)
Sun 21 December 2025 15:15, UK
To ignore Led Zeppelin’s debut album as one of the pivotal moments in rock history would be to forget a large chunk of modern music as we know it today. The blues-heavy sound laid the foundations for heavy metal and countless other genres and it shook the music scene to its core. While The Beatles and The Stones were getting trippy, Zeppelin had got heavy, real heavy.
But while they were happy to lay down some serious heft, the group also found themselves drawn to things of the past, including, it would seem, the odd choral harmony.
Nobody was ever going to replace Robert Plant as the lead singer of Led Zeppelin. The band members’ responsibilities were more or less set in stone: Plant on vocals, Jimmy Page on guitar, John Paul Jones on bass, and John Bonham on drums. That was where the magic was created, and none of the members felt like messing with that.
However, there was some room for additional manoeuvring. Jones was famously a multi-instrumentalist, bringing keyboards into the band’s sound to widen their scope. Both Jones and Page took turns playing the mandolin on the group’s folk material, while Bonham occasionally lent his voice to harmony vocals with Plant on songs like ‘The Ocean’ and ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’.
On one occasion, Page did circumvent Jones to lay down a bass part for the coda to ‘That’s The Way’ from Led Zeppelin III. “I was doing a bunch of overdubs and got excited. John Paul Jones went home, so I put the bass part on it as well!” Page explained in the book Light and Shade. “That didn’t happen often, believe me!” But thanks to their group unity and understanding of what made the band special, few credits are out of place in the Zeppelin discography.
That makes it strange, then, that on the band’s debut album, all four members are credited with providing vocals. Songs like ‘Good Times, Bad Times’ and ‘Communication Breakdown’ clearly feature Plant overdubbing his own harmony vocals, so where do the full-band vocal credits come in? That would be on ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’, the opening track to side two.
The origins of ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ began with Page attempting to play an out-of-tune steel guitar in the studio. “I had never played steel before, but I just picked it up,” Page later told Guitar Player magazine. “It sounds like a slide or something. It’s more out of tune on the first album because I hadn’t got a kit to put it together.” From there, a Jones organ intro and a series of chorus vocals from all four members fleshed out the track.
‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ was one of the only tracks from the band’s debut that never experienced any confirmed live performances. By the time Zeppelin stormed America for their first tour in 1968, ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ didn’t make the cut for their live setlists.
Check out the studio version of ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’ down below.
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