‘Carouselambra’ may sound like a playful work of progressive rock, but beneath those lively synths and cymbal clashes lies the tale of a band breaking down. Though they’re muffled beneath John Paul Jones’ playing, Robert Plant’s words chart the growing dysfunction that Led Zeppelin members experienced while making their final full-length offering, In Through the Out Door.
By the time Led Zeppelin got in the studio to record their eighth record, the group was struggling to get along. John Bonham and Jimmy Page had been taken in by rock stardom, floundering with substance abuse and displaying a lack of commitment towards their recording sessions. Jones and Plant grew increasingly frustrated with their band members, taking on the bulk of the work for what would be their final record.
As the studio sessions served to enhance those growing personal differences, Plant would pen ‘Carouselambra’ as a way to voice his frustrations. The sprawling ten-minute track may stun with synths at first but, upon a closer listen, Plant has suggested that it reveals information about the entirety of the band’s final years.
Though the song tells this story in particularly literary language, often sounding more like a fairytale or an epic poem than the story of four rock stars, there are dramatised glimpses of their dysfunctions throughout its lengthy runtime. “How keen the storied hunter’s eye prevails upon the land to seek the unsuspecting and the weak,” Plant sings, “And powerless the fabled sat, too smug to lift a hand toward the foe that threatened from the deep.”
The track would never receive a live outing, but Plant maintained his tentative pride in it during a conversation with Mojo. “I thought parts of ‘Carouselambra’ were good,” he declared, “Especially on the darker dirges that Pagey developed.”
The songwriter’s only issue with the track seems to be how indecipherable his lyrics became, shrouding the story of Led Zeppelin. “And I rue it so much now,” he stated, “Because the lyrics on ‘Carouselambra’ were actually about that environment and that situation. The whole story of Led Zeppelin in its latter years is in that song… and I can’t hear the words!”
Though they might not always be discernable amidst the prog-rock soundscapes that surround them, that story does remain just beneath the surface, charting those final years of Led Zeppelin before Bonham’s death and their resulting break-up a year later.
Revisit ‘Carouselambra’ below.