In association with Americana Music Foundation, the Grammy Museum is thrilled to welcome eight-time Grammy Award-winning artist Robert Plant to Riverside Revival for a performance with the band from his most recent album, Saving Grace, and a discussion moderated by legendary music journalist David Fricke.
Though Robert Plant is the biggest name on the cover of Saving Grace, the album is very much a group effort, with its title also serving as this new band’s moniker. The group members, all hailing from the English countryside near Plant’s home, 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, who calls the record “a song book of the lost and found,” they’re keen to explore how these genres are evolving as well as to discover where these repertoires originated—and how collectively they can reinvigorate this music they love.
That sensibility is reflected in songs ranging from familiar traditional numbers like the plaintive “I Never Will Marry,” the African-American spiritual “Gospel Plough,” and “Chevrolet”—which Donovan adapted into his “Hey Gyp (Dig the Slowness)” in 1965—to beautifully rendered outliers like Providence, RI trio The Low Anthem’s haunting “The Ticket Taker,” revered indie-rock duo Low’s epic “Everybody’s Song,” and Moby Grape’s pastoral “It’s A Beautiful Day Today.” Plant, who produced the album with the band, rarely claims center stage, most often sharing vocals with co-billed singer Suzi Dian and sometimes ceding the mic to her entirely. On Blind Willie Johnson’s “The Soul of a Man,” guitarist-banjo player Matt Worley takes the lead, with Dian and Plant serving as backup. Drummer Oli Jefferson, guitarist Tony Kelsey, and cellist Barney Morse-Brown round out the Saving Grace Band.
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.
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.
“It’s been a revelation—the sweetness of this thing,” he says. “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.”
Doors 6:30 PM
Show 7:30 PM