“I’m an old guy, right? I’m not old, but I’m old,” Robert Plant offers up, recollecting a charmed musical life that began in 1960s England in his early teens. “I remember the excitement that came off the radio waves when you knew that somebody was coming to town who you didn’t know much about. Maybe Creem magazine didn’t like you yet or whatever. The ‘unknown’ was coming. So you could create your own imagination of how it was gonna pan out.”

With the Saving Grace tour lineup and album of the same name (the LP credited to “Robert Plant with [singer] Suzi Dian”), Plant’s players are a relatively unknown crew of talent and depth. By dint of pandemic pauses and far-flung locales around the U.K.’s Cotswolds and on the Welsh Borders, the lineup managed to quietly ferment and realize some of that long-ago unknown magical mystery.

In a dozen songs on “Saving Grace,” ranging from “Gospel Plough” (a reworking of the traditional tune recorded by Bob Dylan as “Gospel Plow”) to “I Never Will Marry” (popularized by everyone from the Carter Family to Linda Ronstadt) to album opener “Chevrolet” — a version of Donovan’s “Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness),” itself based on a song by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy — songs are lovingly researched, reimagined and dis- and re-assembled.

“I really like just the opportunity to make a difference for myself,” Plant says about the breadth of his creative endeavors. “I mean, it’s a pretty abstract thing. I used to put records out in the ‘80s on Atlantic and was really good friends with Ahmet Ertegun over the years. His prowess and his reputation were magnificent — a magnificent guy — just part of the warp and weft of all good music that came through there. I put out these particularly obscure-ish records,” the singer remembers, a smile in his voice. “I put one out called ‘Shaken and Stirred.’ Probably almost the end of my career. Everybody fled from me, going, ‘Why?!’

“I went up to his office to have a coffee, and Ahmet said, ‘Hey, hey, man, this record. There are no guitar solos,’” Plant recalls.

“I said, ‘well, the guitarist is playing exactly the same notes as Richie Hayward, the drummer. He’s just following the drum rhythm in the fiddle in between verses.’

“He said, ‘This is really fine, man. But why don’t you put the band back together?’

“I said ‘Ahmet, you know, don’t you? You know. You know.’ It was very all those days of, ‘oh my God, look at his hair. He’s got a mullet.’ All that stuff.”

Quietly, Plant says, “See, the thing is, I wasn’t too old at the end. You know, when John [Bonham] passed away, yeah, I wasn’t too old to, you know, to go the wrong way. I was still young enough to keep moving.

“And somehow, in a way, in the memory of he and I, when we were young, before and during Zeppelin, we were what we call in England, ‘Chancers.’ [opportunists]. So I thought, yeah, I’m carrying on. I’m going now. And I take a bit of him with me most places, really.

“Because, you know, the stack heels are long gone. So what was it going to do? I was going to just do what the hell I wanted to do,” Plant says. “And these people came along with me, and that’s what we’ve got. But you know [with ‘Saving Grace’] we’ve stepped over the margin. Now I’ve carried the bride across the threshold.”

Much of the album’s emotional tone is poignant, which makes the collection feel a part of an unending cycle of connection. Timeless but timely, pure and apt for this fraught and divisive time in history.

“Within us all, as this little group of people who come out from an unexpected corner, especially this time in my being … That feeling that you get, not when you look to the West,” Plant says, with a slight chuckle at his own lyrical reference, “but this one; we’ve found this thing together, and we go, ‘wow, this is great.’ So there’s a joy in the melancholia. Basically, it’s just choice of notation, the hanging on notes, which comes across much better when we play live.”

It’s supper time where Plant is phoning from his hotel room, and after a dinner down the road, he’s planning to attend a “general knowledge quiz.” He’s local and low key by design. In conversation the singer is thoughtful, humble and, to use his own lyrics, now he’s reached that age and stage where he “tried to do all those things the best I can.”

He found that residing in Austin, Texas, “I just felt a little bit too much on display. You can’t moan about success, because I don’t think many musicians could claim that they don’t like the fact that people like what they do,” Plant says. “I mean, it’s a conundrum, but it’s very nice.”

The return to his homeland was inspirational, especially the natural world. “I felt the hills and the mountains and the rivers sort of welcomed me back, and it was great. I wrote a song on the last album with the Sensational Space Shifters with the guys in the band. It’s called ‘Embrace Another Fall,’ and it probably really sums up my emotional baby cake. I’m still thrilled. I mean, the fall is upon us right now here, and it’s raining outside. It’s wonderful, damp, dreary, and the pubs are open.”

And the singer’s drink of choice at his local?

“Everything, always,” he quips.

As a child, Plant recalls trundling in his family’s car through interesting, evocative landscapes and, “Misty Mountains that actually were misty mountains,” he says, making another of his not-infrequent Zeppelin asides. “They were [misty] yesterday morning when I woke up on the Welsh coast in a little hotel, and there was a mist over the water, and about 2,000 Canadian Geese landed. That filled me with lyric.

“So when I came back [to the U.K.] and as chance would have it, teamed up with these guys slowly, the bells and the lights started flashing, and I thought, ‘This is too good now to share. This is mine, and this is ours, and let’s just keep it really tiny.’”

Banjo and string player Matt Worley was “Saving Grace’s” musical instigator, approaching Plant at a pub. He brought Dian in as a singer; she recruited husband Oli Jefferson on drums, with guitarist Tony Kelsey and cellist Barney Morse-Brown rounding out the lineup. Worley, despite his relative youth, proved an ideal collaborator for the 77-year-old singer.

The English folk scene grabbed hold of Worley at a young age, and when he approached the Zeppelin legend, he didn’t fanboy. “He was very conversant with the Incredible String Band, with Bert Jansch, with Sandy Denny. So I met somebody in the middle of all this who didn’t need to play in a pub band, playing songs by from the ‘70s or the ‘80s or the ‘90s,” says Plant. “Matt could do that, but he had this other deal. I was impressed because his enthusiasm was really good.”

Plus, Plant adds slyly, “he was mature and comical and had a great capacity for knowledge and alcohol.”

Plant with singer Suzi Dian.

(Todd Oldham)

In “Saving Grace,” Plant is still learning the band’s unspoken musical language. “Even now, I’m kind of in the dark when Matt and Suzi look at each other and their index finger goes up or down, as if to say, ‘you take that part. You go over there with that vocal part there.’ I go, Wow.’”

Fortunately, Plant comes with tutoring from his partner on two albums, bluegrass-country singer/fiddler Alison Krauss. “Alison said to me, ‘Well, I really like the time we have, but do you think we should sing the same song together?’

“I said, ’What are you referring to?’”

“She said, ‘Well, how can we harmonize if you keep changing the melody?’

“I said, ‘Ah, that’s the thing about harmony singing, you lock in!’ And she looked at me, raised her eyebrows, and went, ‘yeah.’ So that was funny.”

Harmonizing for Plant, is “one of the most nerve-racking and evidentially vulnerable parts of anything that I’ve ever done,” he admits. “To take off into a project, not knowing, really, how clean the soul is of the person that you’re with. How you have to have flexibility and wait and be patient. For us with Suzi, I mean, she was a music teacher. She’s locked in stylistically, she can call on any interval in harmony, but for the way that we work at this, she just drops into it in perfectly the right place.” That’s clear on the band’s rendition of the “As I Roved Out,” a traditional folk song with dozens of disparate versions by the likes of the Clancy Brothers, Planxty and Fairport Convention, as well as the 1969 Moby Grape song “It’s a Beautiful Day Today,” Plant’s pure, gently powerful vocals working with Dian’s to create a lovely, gentle ray of positivity.

As for the throughline in songs born from different decades, genders, races and countries, Plant feels that everything lives alongside one another. “We’re all on board the same ship and because of Suzi’s voice, the texture, is beautiful. It’s a good complement and a good juxtaposition. That’s a great thing about these songs,” he says. “They rumble through time. We’re just putting a little bit of paint on some here and there, and maybe a little bit of echo and little bit of that sort of trippy stuff.” A relatively intimate theater tour of 25-plus dates in the U.S. and England suits Saving Grace perfectly, Plant seeing the lineup as having their “own little keys to the kingdom. We have a good time and no great ambition to go anywhere but this,” he says.

The singer returns to the matrimonial analogies to describe the myriad musicality and collabs of his storied solo career. “I think I’ve been on a very long honeymoon, really, since about 1999. I’ve been in great musical company, from Ali Farka Touré in the desert north of Timbuktu to having silly conversations with Buddy Guy at his club, going over here, doing that. And now I have this sort of pass,” he says. “It’s like a kind of global entry, but with a different possibility, considering that a lot of the time I’m not exactly bluffing it, but I’m trying my best to make this work.’”

“Saving Grace” works, and it’s been Plant’s own saving grace, as he notes, “I haven’t written anything original since I wrote one thing with T Bone [Burnett] on the [2021’s] “Raise the Roof.” Really, I think, the vastness of today and what we are looking at as far as the future for all of us is just so twisted in turmoil. I don’t think I have anywhere that I can actually land in song. I know what I write down. But what I write down doesn’t belong in a soundscape.”

Yet bringing his “Saving Grace” songs to life in a new light has been a boon in an era when the world citizen believes that once we “get through this thing, we have to sing on the other side of it. If that’s going to be at all possible.” Despite his obvious care, enthusiasm and potent, eloquent singing, Plant is aware of “the inevitability of my time coming round the corner,” but says, “I just like to think that I can keep rearranging songs and bringing them forward and having the joy of recording them.”

5 Seconds of Summer enjoys the hottest possible start on the ARIA Albums Chart as Everyone’s A Star! (Universal) debuts at No. 1 — and gifts the pop-rock band a chart record.

With their latest chart crown, confirmed last Friday, Nov. 21, the Sydney four-piece becomes the first act in the history of the ARIA Charts to hit No. 1 with their first six studio albums.

That record dates back to 5 Seconds of Summer (in 2014), and includes Sounds Good Feels Good (2015), Youngblood (2018), Calm (2020) and 5SOS5 (2022). For the record, 5SOS’s live album, LiveSOS, cracked the top 10, peaking at No. 7 in 2014.

It’s the sixth homegrown title to lead the chart in 2025, including 5OS’s Calum Hood, whose solo effort Order Chaos Order led for one cycle in June.

5SOS returned to Australia last month for a brief promo trip, including a fan-led press conference in Melbourne and their induction to the Australian Walk of Fame in Sydney.

It’s an all-Australian 1-2 on the albums survey, as the 40th anniversary edition of Jimmy Barnes’ For The Working Class Man (Mushroom Music) digs in at No. 2. The Scotland-born Australian rock legend boasts more No. 1 albums in Australia than any other artist. A two-time ARIA Hall of Fame inductee, Barnes has 16 chart leaders as a solo act, and another six with Cold Chisel.

Thanks to 5SOS and Barnesy, as he’s affectionately known in these parts, Taylor Swift’s Life of a Showgirl (Republic/Universal) is finally bumped from the throne, down 1-3, ending six consecutive weeks at the top.

Soulful Sydney newcomer Don West opens his account at No. 25 with his debut album Give Me All Your Love, while Byron Bay punk rock quartet Mini Skirt starts at No. 36 with their sophomore effort, All That We Know (Orchard). It’s their first appearance on the chart.

The 2025 ARIA Awards were presented on Wednesday night in Sydney, but the impact is still being felt on the national charts.

Following her performance of “Man I Need” (Universal), rising English singer Olivia Dean scores her first No. 1 on the ARIA Singles Chart, as the song lifts 2-1. Dean followed up her ARIAs performance with an outdoor set at Fleet Steps, and she’ll be back next year for a tour proper.

After winning two ARIAs, Kevin Parker’s Tame Impala bites into the ARIA top 30 with “Dracula” (Columbia/Sony). It’s up 34-28, a new peak position, and is the only homegrown cut in the top 50.

You Am I was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, and had the final word on the evening with a two-song performance of “Heavy Heart” and “Berlin Chair,” both of which appear on The Dollop & The Wallop: The Best Of (Sony). The career retrospective is new at No. 15 on the ARIA Albums Chart.  

Finally, RÜFÜS DU SOL collected four nominations at the ARIAs and are currently on the road, in support of their fifth studio album, Inhale/Exhale (Rose Avenue Records/Warner). The tour is breathing new life into the album, lifting 47-39.