Robert Plant gave an intersting interview to Classic Rock Magazine. He talked about his new album, the career and of course, Led Zeppelin. And when asked about the band’s reunion he said “stop living in the past. Open your ears and your eyes. It’s not that difficult, is it?”.

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On most of your albums, you often refer to places you’ve been to. Carry Fire seems to be about the period of time you spent living in Austin, Texas.

Three years, yeah. Austin was just the door, the portal for finding that there’s so much more to… Austin. Everybody knows it’s a great democratic, liberal centre of stuff, but take the roads west from there and you turn into Comanche country. And then you realise that there was a whole weave that’s been moved out of the way; a whole way of living, a whole understanding and a relationship with the earth that has been superseded.

And I found that by living there. I didn’t even know what I was going to find. I didn’t look for anything, but then I found this sort of remarkable lure towards the majesty of the Comanche nation.

You still travel a lot. Is that in your blood, is that what makes you who you are?

Yeah. Well, I’ve got acquaintances in the form of friends and I’m acquainted with beautiful places as well. The motion in me is to work, to sing, to write, to learn, and so I do return to certain places. And I feel the changes, and it’s a great liberation for me.

Did you leave Austin because of your breakup with (singer-songwriter) Patty Griffin (in 2014), or because of your experiences with the US judiciary?

Are you referring to that ludicrous [Stairway To Heaven] trial? I won’t go into that [laughs]. Sorry, mate.

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But you split up with Patty?

I did, yeah… And if you listen to the album you can hear me pouring out my heart to whoever’s interested. Cos that’s what I do. And it’s not easy to do that, believe me.

Okay, so let’s say instead that you left Austin because you missed the misty mountains.

That’s better! And I did. That’s what brought me back, really. That and family humour.

How do you keep up with what’s going on in music? I don’t.

Things just come past me. If I was a DJ on the radio, I would get all the new material I could ever wish for. Sadly I’m not, so sometimes I miss things completely. It’s a big world, music, now, and some of it gets to me and some of it doesn’t.

But there’s very little going on in rock music these days, wouldn’t you agree?

Well, that’s a bit of a blessing. How do you mean? Well, I think it ran out of steam a little bit, didn’t it? Kind of. It probably peaked, did what it had to do, and now the hybrids of rock have become like Them Crooked Vultures and people like that, which is good music but it’s not rock. Well, maybe it is rock. Maybe my idea of what rock was probably was a bit lost in translation.