Featuring a very Plant-like vocal by Clayton Kauffman, and a note for note (N4N) arrangement as faithful to the original as possible, The Stairway Project is proud to present this cover of Led Zeppelin’s Ten Years Gone for your listening pleasure. Released in 1975 on the double album Physical Graffiti, Ten Years Gone is a fan favorite and has been described by some as one of Jimmy Page‘s most ingenious compositions. With it’s origins in the “Kitchen Demos” , Jimmy and the band managed to create this archetypal Zeppelin masterpiece. It has all the essential elements for just such plaudit: the light & shade; the dark and foreboding; the beautiful and the majestic. It has one of the finest executions of Jimmy’s concept of the guitar army ever put to wax, along with a deeply personal Robert Plant lyric and vocal that captures the expressive and dynamic range of his voice. It also has a fantastic and highly expressive and percussive John Paul Jones bass track, and an absolutely monster John Bonham drum track full of gigantic fills and a thunderous kick drum. And – if it can be said – it also has one of the sickest and coolest heavy riffs of any Zeppelin recording. Add to all this one wailing outro that has the band firing on all cylinders, and you have the perfect Zeppelin song.
This project cover (Ten Years Gone) started in 2018 after we finished the original Stairway Project Mixes. I used to play TYG while warming up and tuning guitars (back in the day) as it was always a good song to use to evaluate a guitar’s intonation (owing to the positions you needed to play in, and all the diads (double stops) and open strings. When we (at The Stairway Project) discussed what the next project should be, it just seemed to make sense that it had to be TYG. Like the original Stairway Project, we recorded a complete demo version of the song using scratch tracks (literally hundreds of them) while we dove deep into the arrangement to discover its secrets. Some individual guitar tracks themselves were re-tracked over a hundred times during the process while we tweaked the time grid and drum tracks and dove deep into the sorcery of its production mysteries.
We listened (audited) to the Zeppelin original 1000’s of times over the course of the last 18 months – sometimes 30 or 40 times a day…… We consulted sheet music, live renditions, YouTube tutorials, old magazine tabs, isolated tracks, demo recordings… pretty much every resource available to ensure we had things accurate. Most of the collateral material on the web was of relatively low quality and often wrong or inaccurate, but it’s totally worth your time going through that process and using your own ear to vet the info you find. It all helps you zero in on the details that make or break the cover in terms of accuracy and will help make you a better musician by developing your ear.
There are one of two little deviations from the original Zeppelin arrangement in our cover (undetectable to most ears). We might have doubled one of two little guitar parts/lines to give us a little more energy or push in the mix when needed, and the guitar solo itself is a very early pass that was originally recorded by memory as a placeholder – but we fell in love with it over time (it’s still very very close to the original with only some small deviations near the end) so we decided to keep it as is.
A word on Clay’s vocal – Clay has a quality to his voice – that cater-wail that Plant can do that is ghostly and eerie. Plant’s vocal tuning on the Zeppelin original is very fluid and Clay did a great job allowing that fluidity to come through his own performance as well, while still keeping the vocal in key. He was fearless in that regard. Plant is enormously tricky to emulate and it can be very hard finding someone willing and capable of taking it on – Clayton did a fantastic job there and we are very pleased and thankful for his contribution to the cover. We hope to do a feature article on Clay at some point.
For those who prefer a soundcloud link you can listen here:
You can also play the MP3 here in the site.
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Feature Photo Credit: Enchanted by Richard Walker, via Flickr 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
