Which one is your favorite? - XIX -

I noticed that I haven't chosen a proper rock song recently in the "Which one is your favorite?" posts. So here is a great song from the 70s by the great Led Zeppelin. It is the opening track on the band's second album, Led Zeppelin II, and was released in the United States, several countries in Europe, and Japan as a single.

Here is the song for this week;

"Whole Lotta Love"

Jimmy Page came up with the guitar riff for "Whole Lotta Love" in the summer of 1968, on his houseboat on the River Thames at Pangbourne, England.

Robert Plant's lyrics are based on a 1962 Muddy Waters song written by Willie Dixon called "You Need Love". The band reached an agreement with Dixon, who used the settlement money to set up a program providing instruments for schools.

The massive drum sound was the foundation of this track, so Jimmy Page recorded it in the big room at Olympic Studios in London, which had 28-foot ceilings. One of the engineers, George Chkiantz, got the sound by putting the drums on a platform and setting up microphones in unusual places: a stereo boom eight feet above the kit, two distant side microphones, and a AKG D30 placed two feet from the bass drum. "For the song to work as this panoramic audio experience, I needed Bonzo to really stand out, so that every stick stroke sounded clear and you could really feel them," Page said in the Wall Street Journal. "If the drums were recorded just right, we could lay in everything else."

Jimmy Page served as Led Zeppelin's producer, and on this song, he let loose in the studio, using all kinds of innovative techniques, particularly in the free form section about 1:20 in, which was the result of him and engineer Eddie Kramer "twiddling every knob known to man." This part is often referred to as "the freakout."

One of the more intriguing sections of this song comes at the 4-minute mark, where the distant voice of Robert Plant sings each line ("Way down inside... woman... you need... love") before his full-throated vocal comes in. This is known as "backward echo," and one of the first uses of the technique, but it happened by accident: A different take of Plant's vocal bled over to his master vocal track, so when Page and engineer Eddie Kramer mixed the song, they couldn't get rid of it. They did what most creative professionals do with a mistake: they accentuated it to make it sound intentional, adding reverb to it so Plant sounded like he was foreshadowing his lines from afar.

In 2004, the song was ranked number 75 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and in March 2005, Q magazine placed "Whole Lotta Love" at number three in its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks. It was placed 11 on a similar list by Rolling Stone. In 2009 it was named the third greatest hard rock song of all time by VH1. In 2014, listeners to BBC Radio 2 voted "Whole Lotta Love" as containing the greatest guitar riff of all time.

I suggest you first listen to the original before the below covers as it is really a great song which sounds way beyond its time...

And here are the 3 versions I picked for you;

• Nguyên Lê - "Whole Lotta Love"

• Hozier - "Whole Lotta Love"

• Mary J. Blige - "Whole Lotta Love"

Now the floor is yours, go ahead and make your comments (here, Instagram, Facebook wherever you feel like...).

nb. Please note that I intentionally do not include the original versions of the songs as it would be a little unfair to the artists covering the songs, and I am sure that sometimes you will be surprised to see that the songs you thought were the originals are just covers..