Thank you, Robert Plant

Yes, THAT Robert Plant, the so-called Golden God of Rock who sang, screamed, howled and wailed his way into the pantheon of late 1960's and early '70s rock and roll, the guy who wrote the song either loved or loathed by millions (Stairway to Heaven), the singer who says he'll never sing with Led Zeppelin again but who cannot seem to shut up.

I owe Robert Plant, and he doesn't even know it.

Here's the background: About three months ago I bought something online. I can't even remember what it was. Anyway, after I checked out I got this pop-up ad offering name-brand magazines for only $1 per title for a  year with a limit of 3 titles. I took the bait because, hey, for only $1 I could read 'em through and give them to the waiting room at my daughter's speech clinic, right? Easy fare for those days when more cerebral literature is just too much, I reasoned.

Looking through the titles, my eyes rested on Rolling Stone, a magazine I used to read with wild abandon back in the 1980s when I was in high school and music of all sorts was the ultimate fascination. RS was printed on large tabloid-type paper back then and its politically liberal slant didn't register with me. I was more interested in news of my favorite artists -- Dylan, the surviving Beatles, Journey, Van Halen, Rush, and the like. I appreciated the magazine's willingness to interview musicians about more than just their latest album, and I was a faithful subscriber until I graduated from college.

Once I became a mother, everything changed. Suddenly, I found myself slightly repulsed at much of what RS had to offer. Now it was the year 2000, and nearly all the good rock and roll groups had either disbanded or their key players were dead. My mind and heart turned inward, towards the new act of juggling a baby for the first time, and I stopped caring about the lives of pretty much everyone else. I gave up RS for good sometime around 2003.

Fast forward to now, and my $1 offer to try RS again. Did I dare? With two of my three children avidly reading everything that falls in their line of sight, I reasoned I'd have to hide the magazine when it came in. RS now as in the days of yore is notorious for its sexually suggestive or alcohol touting ads. And what about the cover itself? The first issue I got had singer Katy Perry in an uber-pointy bra on the front. Exactly the sort of image I didn't want my girls to see.

Like a guilty pleasure, I waited until the kids were all outside playing before I opened the magazine and began to thumb past the articles bashing politicians I actually admire. Where was the good stuff? The news about relevant rock and roll? Had I been out of the loop so long that I would find nothing I could relate to?

And then, there it was, an interview with Robert Plant. Him, I remembered! Led Zeppelin was a big deal when I was in grammar school. I remembered hearing the news of drummer John Bonham's death and how, because of it, the band would never play together again. I remember buying their last album, "In Through the Out Door," and feeling like something good had been taken away much too soon.

And I remembered the silence. It lasted for about three years until Robert Plant returned with a solo career that left us Zeppelin purists shaking our heads in disbelief. He'd gone all '80s on us and the techno-pop of his new music combined with the tragic 1980s fashion and haircut was a big turnoff.

My friends and I stopped listening, preferring to leave Led Zeppelin dead and buried, right alongside John Bonham.

I forgot about Robert Plant for the next 20 years.

Sitting there with my Katy Perry Rolling Stone, I was intrigued enough to actually read the interview with Plant. What had he been doing all these years? Why was he making the news at all?

I learned about his 2008 collaboration with Alison Krauss, a stellar and angelic bluegrass fiddler and singer. How weird was that? And what was their album, "Raising Sand," all about? The article said it won five Grammys in '09, so it must have been good. But Robert Plant and bluegrass? Robert Plant and anything that wasn't Led Zep? Thanks, but no.

A long-time fan of acoustic music and bluegrass in particular, I recalled the article later that evening. It bugged me. I wanted to know more.

So I googled "Raising Sand," and found some interviews and music videos on YouTube.

I was absolutely blown away.

The voice, the voice that I remembered from 30+ years ago, that unmistakable voice that readily identifies Plant as the singer -- it was still there, only now it was melded with Krauss' dreamy, pure harmonies in a whole new way.

And what were these songs? Some of them sounded like rockabilly from Buddy Holly, the Everly Bros., Roy Orbison. One was a haunting bluegrass piece by the ace guitar picker Doc Watson and his wife. Another was a song Plant wrote himself for an earlier album, only now it featured Krauss' white-hot violin.

As I dug in deeper, trying to understand how a singer known more for 1970s excess could transform into a serious, mature musician, I began reading interviews done with Plant over the past three years. After a few evenings of this research, I decided I like him better now as a man of 63 than I did when he was the 20-something god of rock who pranced about on stage, long hair flowing, and singing "Whole Lotta Love" at ear-bursting levels.

I grew up, and apparently so did Robert Plant. Marvelous!

In one interview Plant gave in his 60th year, he talked about how he continuously pursues new music. He travels and reads and is really quite the intellectual in spite of his youthful dope-smokin' days and wild man ways.

He's had it all, lost it all, and had to reinvent himself on his own terms. He's humble about it and, from all accounts he's nothing like the big-headed Hollywood types who pretend to rule the world. He's, well, he's likable.

The more I read about Plant and his revolutionary journey into Americana music (he's recently recorded another album in Nashville with a band that consists of some of our finest acoustic musicians), the more I began to long for the days when I, too, experimented with music and went so far as to attempt to play stringed instruments for which I'd had no background or training.

I still had them -- a guitar and a mountain dulcimer -- but they were gathering dust after nearly 15 years of neglect. Life had gotten in their way -- marriage, job, a baby, another baby, two more babies after that. As we moved from place to place, I always felt sad when it came time to load up my instruments. I shuffled them from pillar to post but  never played them. My finger callouses disappeared and my hands got soft. Playing the guitar would be too painful now, I decided. Besides, wasn't I too old? I'm a mother, for goodness sake, with children to teach and raise. I would save the instruments for them, if any of them were ever interested.

But wait. What about Robert Plant? What about a man who refuses to stay in a rut -- indeed travels and records and studies and questions and performs all over the world in search of new musical inspiration? He was nearly 60 before he won his Grammys. What if he'd given up after Led Zeppelin and had never sung again? Look what he would have missed.

Then the epiphany hit me.

If that old dog could learn new tricks, or the same tricks he already knew but in different forms, then why couldn't I? If Robert Plant could pick back up at 60 and open up a whole new can of musical whoopass, then who's to say I am too old at 45 to pick back up the dream I used to have -- to be able to play for pleasure and to do so well enough to learn new songs. Oh, and did I mention that I'd always wanted to learn the mandolin but never got around to it?

So I took my cue from an aging rocker and brought my guitar out of hiding to have it cleaned up and restrung. Same for the dulcimer. And I bought a mandolin. Oh, and I'm taking music lessons again. And my kids are hearing for the first time some of the music their mother grew up with -- Elvis, Dylan, various bluegrass artists, the tamer Zep stuff, and of course, "Raising Sand." They've been introduced to new instruments, new sounds, and their own musical knowledge has already begun to expand beyond the piano they all play. One of my daughters now wants her own dulcimer and my oldest son says he wants to learn the electric guitar. Won't it be fun, they say, when we can all play together?

I'll  never be a rock star, I'll likely never play in public at all. But there's something very satisfying about learning something new after so many years of convincing myself that particular ship had sailed. I like to think I'm setting a good example for my children by showing them that life should never stand still and we should never stop learning new things.

And to think I owe it all to Robert Plant.

Thanks, Percy. You still rock.

When the dance is over

My daughters have been studying ballet since they were five and three, respectively. My older daughter decided she wanted to learn to dance after her grandmother and aunt took her to see a Christmas production of The Nutcracker. The following spring I began researching ballet schools and places to buy leotards, tights, and shoes. Her little sister watched all of this unfold with some fascination and asked me to buy her a "dance costume," too.

When I asked her whether she wanted to take lessons she shook her little blonde head. "No, I don't want to take a class, I just want the clothes."

I bought her a tiny leotard and some tiny tights and a little filmy skirt and she wore them nearly every day in lieu of more conventional dress-up play.

After about two months of watching her older sister get ready for ballet class, my younger daughter announced that she had changed her mind and was now ready to take lessons, too. She has always been precocious and sure of her own mind, so I had no reason to doubt her sincerity.

And so it began.

Now, nearly six years of fall sessions, spring sessions, summer sessions, special ballet camps, workshops, rehearsals and recitals later, the dance is over.

The dance is over.

It wasn't my choice but theirs, and I have had the exquisite pleasure of being able to talk with my daughters heart to heart about their reasons for giving it up. At 11 and 9, they are unusually circumspect about things and they are able to tell me in near-adult terms why they want to stop dancing.

I have listened, asked questions, probed the depths, and am thoroughly satisfied that I'm not raising a generation of quitters. Rather, I am raising a generation of smart young women who already know their own minds years ahead of many girls their age.

I am disappointed that I will likely never see them dance again, but I am proud beyond all measure of their ability to tell me why.

My oldest daughter said she likes playing music more than she likes moving to it. She studies the piano and spends countless hours practicing what's required by her teacher as well as composing her own tunes with titles like "Titanic," and "Falling Leaves." She also likes to write and draw and is becoming scarily fluent in both ancient Greek and contemporary Russian. She's recently matriculated to a new level of Girl Scouting and has begun work on the highest award a scout of her level can earn. In short, she is busy doing things she loves, and ballet is not one of them.

My younger daughter cast an even brighter light on her reasons for giving up the dance. She, too, studies piano and says she would eventually like to learn another instrument or two. "The thing about ballet is that you always do only what the instructor tells you to do," she said. "You can't choose the order in which to practice the barre or your floor work, and the routine is always the same. When you play an instrument, there are millions of songs you can learn and you can work on part of a hard song and then set it aside to play something easier and more fun before going back to work again on the hard piece. I can do this at my own pace and I can do it any time I want to, even every day. I don't have any control over the ballet class but the ballet class controls me. It's too structured."

Spoken like the free-spirited artist she is.

This is the child who invents her own craft projects, pours over books of paper, cloth or clay projects and uses bits and pieces to make her own creations. This is the child who cannot do a paint-by-numbers project because she wants to pick her own colors for the picture. This is the child who loves to test herself at the piano. How fast CAN she play a piece? Metronome or no? Classical or folk?

It's the endless variety of playable music, and the loose structure in which she practices and plays that makes the piano so satisfying. Ballet is rigid, unforgiving. Its curriculum is very specific, its measures of progress largely unyielding to differences in body type, developmental ability, degree of passion.

With ballet, you either love it or you don't.

With music you can love one instrument or love several. You can play a piano or a guitar, a banjo or a mandolin, a violin or a cello -- and music that's been written for one can be modified for playing on another. There is no limit to music. Ballet as a style of dance seems endlessly predictable. My daughter tells me she doesn't want to give it up because it's getting too hard. Rather, it's getting too boring.

How can I possibly doubt her when she tells me she does not love ballet -- indeed often dreads it and its encroachment into her schedule of reading, piano, sewing, painting, drawing, exploring -- and is not sad in the least to let it go?

How can I force her to bend her will to something that in time will take over her life? Now, it's two classes per week. In another year it might be three, then four. And for what? She told me she dreads the day she will have to give up her freedom to the dance. It's obvious that ballet does not liberate her, it binds her.



My daughters' feet may never dance across a floor again, but as I listen to their fingers dance over the piano keys as they play and sing together and for each other I am reminded that talent takes many forms and that none of those forms matter if they do not bring us joy.

There's a whole lot of joy emanating from our music room right now. The dance may be over, but the music plays on.