It's OK to quote from your past. But I'm more interested in quoting from my present and pointing towards the future.

And there are certain songs that are really timepieces and shouldn't be touched. But some of them are a celebration of good humour and sensibility and I think that's okay. I don't care about the past, I'm a musician with ambition.

Back in my day, we called it rock 'n' roll, but then we always reminded listeners that it was no big deal if they didn't like it.

You would find in a lot of Zep stuff that the riff was the juggernaut that careered through and I worked the lyrics around this.

Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

We are trying to communicate a fulfilled ideal. Does anybody remember laughter?

Dolly Parton's done 'Stairway to Heaven.' Anything's possible.