Plant & Krauss Cap Bonnaroo With Rootsy Set of Duets, Led Zep Tune

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While most folks left Bonnaroo on Sunday, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss drew one of the festival's biggest audiences for a high-energy set that included mateiral from their debut collaboration Raising Sand. Plant kicked things off sans Krauss, running through tunes like "Rich Woman" with his backing band, which featured roots-rock legend T Bone Burnett. Plant also treated Zep fans to a rip-roaring rendition of the classic "Black Dog," shrieking and tossing his microphone in the air. Once Krauss joined him onstage, things got progressively more country-fied, with Krauss adding masterful fiddle lines to eerie tunes like "Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us." The crowd was delighted, as was Plant. "Welcome to our little world," he said. "It's a great pleasure to bring this gift. It's been a wonderful time for you and me."

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Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

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