Fox Theater

Though Robert Plant is, literally and figuratively, the biggest name on the cover art for Saving Grace, he would be the first to say that the album is very much a group effort, with its title also serving as this new band’s moniker. The group members were drawn together by a shared love of roots music both vintage and modern—of blues, folk, gospel, country and those tantalizing sounds that lay in between. Like Plant, they’re keen to explore how these genres are evolving as well as to discover where these repertoires originated—and how collectively they could reinvigorate the music they loved.

Despite Plant’s iconic status as an artist since his days with Led Zeppelin, Saving Grace managed to start out in 2019, casually and somewhat discreetly, as a local project. The players had been working collaboratively for barely a year, even serving as an unheralded opening act on a handful of dates with Fairport Convention when the pandemic intervened and any formal plans to tour or release music were temporarily shelved. That turned out to be less setback than serendipity.  It allowed Saving Grace time to gestate, to find a collective voice.

It all began down the pub, in the sort of place where one might have discovered a common thread, a shared passion, with another stranger-turned-new friend before the internet and algorithms took over. As Plant explains, “I came back one time and there was this guy, Matty Worley, a big guy who plays cuatro, two different strung banjos, and acoustic guitar. Thanks to his father, he had been following the Ian Campbell Folk Group, Peggy Seeger, and the people who worked alongside her.

Plant suggested bringing along guitarist Tony Kelsey, “a remarkable guitarist who played around in a lot of different musical set ups. At one time, he was a member of The Move, in one of its many incarnations. We started playing together, shuffling this stuff around and seeing where it would go. And it was really good. But the thing is, I said, ‘I don’t want to be on the sharp end.’ I always talk about singers holding up the sharp end of a performance. I knew I needed another voice on a lot of these songs. Where was the female voice? Where was the sweetness on top of my register? I knew about Suzi; she had her own band, and she is a great singer. I suggested she come along and have a listen to some of the songs I liked. She has spent quite a bit of time teaching, running classes and instructing teachers on how to bring kids forward in music. She’s as sensitive and equally as delicate. She had no premonitions at bringing these songs into the world.”

After trying out a conventional drummer, Plant turned to Dian’s husband, Oli Jefferson: “He had a more polyrhythmic approach; we discussed the whole deal of where I really want to take my music. There’s nothing particularly obscure about what we present on this record. It’s just a different way of doing it.”

Cellist Barney Morse-Brown, aka Duotone, rounds off the ensemble, on record and on tour. The group first ventured from their local haunts to Ireland, where, as Plant recounts, “Of course what do you do in Ireland is you laugh, you sing, then you end up in folk clubs, at arts festivals on the west coast off the great wild Atlantic way. That whole folk community, the fiddle and the bodhran. It was so appropriate to the way I felt and have felt since I was a kid, about that area, that quadrant of my musical love.”

Though Plant headlined stadiums in his storied past, now, he admits, “What I am really impressed by is this living, new world of whatever this music is. Last year we played the Cambridge folk festival. With this mélange of music song and voice, anywhere and everywhere is the way to see the road ahead.

“I’m not jaded by this,” Plant says, finally. “It’s been a revelation—the sweetness of this thing. These are really sweet people. They’re playing all the stuff they could never get out before. They’ve become unique stylists and have created a new place for the old dog.”

—Michael Hill