Robert Plant rarely opts for the easiest route. As the leader of Led Zeppelin, he constantly pushed the boundaries of rock music, experimenting with different genres and sounds to create a distinctive and enduring legacy. But as a soloist, he toyed with narrative—even with something as simple as a love ballad, he challenged perceptions, inviting listeners to form their own interpretations.

Plant’s second solo album, The Principle of Moments, accrued a songwriting team whose focus was to take word-crafted illusion and mythologise creativity by having most of the songs have little or no relation to their titles. As a result, the songs either feel complicated or enlightening, depending on the openness with which they are approached by a listener.

Although Plant released ‘Big Log’ and ‘In The Mood’ as the album’s lead singles, he fought against releasing ‘Open Arms’, despite his team feeling strongly about its power both as a representation of him as a solo artist and the feel of the album in a broader sense. His aversion to releasing the track seems straightforward; he feared being put into a box, criticised for being nothing more than a hard rock figure with little to no depth.

And so he released the softer singles, hoping that this perception would be challenged. However, after the pressure to release ‘Open Arms’ piled on, Plant gave in, despite the fact he expected it to ruin his reputation. He also felt that people thought he would either return to Led Zeppelin or create music that sounded like it, but none of those would be the case. As he explained in Led Zeppelin: The Oral History, “I had the strangest feeling that at the back of everyone’s mind was the conviction that Led Zeppelin would reform, and we could go back to how it was before.”

He continued: “They didn’t realise how serious I was about it. Atlantic soon came to realise I was serious, particularly when ‘Big Log’ was a hit. The song they chose, ‘Other Arms’, was a top-request record for four weeks, but I flatly refused to put it out as a single. I said, ‘No, I’m not a hard rock artist, I can sing from anywhere.’”

When ‘Open Arms’ was released, the radio stations were all over it, which caused it to surpass The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’ on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart.

Rock artists opposing instantaneous, commercial hits seems to be a common theme among some legacy artists—despite many fans finding ‘Open Arms’ so hard-hitting that it’s almost impossible to imagine Plant ever wanting to hide it away. The same goes for many other songs, like The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me’, when Philip Oakey regarded it as too pop-sounding and a threat to their seriousness.