New Wax Wednesday

Well, he can’t sit still, and you know that he’s moving again. I’m speaking about, of course, the perpetual wanderer known as Robert Plant, who earlier today just announced the release of his latest solo LP, Saving Grace, which will arrive via Nonesuch on September 26, 2025. It’s the first album of his featuring a new band of distinguished players under the very same Saving Grace moniker. Ever the wordsmith, Plant calls the album itself “a songbook of the lost and found.”

The genesis of the ten songs that comprise Saving Grace began during the lockdown in “The Shire,” when, as we have been told, Plant’s “customary wandering was all but forbidden.” (Lockdown was no time to ramble on, after all.) What follows is the earliest taste of the fruit of those collective labors — Robert Plant and Saving Grace’s reimagined rendition of Low’s “Everybody’s Song,” via the official YouTube clip below.

Saving Grace is available in a pair of 1LP offerings — a) black vinyl, and b) a color vinyl option that, though not as yet specified or identified per se, appears to be of a raspberryesque and/or mobygrape-ish hue — and for a most reasonable SRP of $24. (Either way, you can see for yourself below.) Saving Grace can be preordered directly from Plant’s official nook in the Nonesuch site store here. We await further details about the source material, pressing plant, and who cut the vinyl — but, given Plant and Nonesuch’s recent, shared track record for how his previous solo albums on the label have been handled, only top-shelf personnel and pressing locale(s) will have been involved in the process.

Some more Saving Grace background now. While Plant’s relatively recent artistic forays have centered around Nashville — including his reuniting with Alison Krauss for November 2021’s chart-topping, multi-Grammy-nominated 2LP set on Rounder/Concord, Raise the Roof — it was in the English countryside that he connected closely to this newest and most diverse group of musicians, who through their own experiences had (in their words) “a shared lean towards his much-loved corners of evocative song.”

Together, Plant and Saving Grace — vocalist Suzi Dian (whose name also appears on the buffalo-imaged album cover), drummer Oli Jefferson, guitarist Tony Kelsey, banjo and string player Matt Worley, and cellist Barney Morse-Brown — have spent the past six years growing into a “wide-ranging workshop of styles and personalities, weaving through time and circumstance with joy and abandon” (again, in their own quite pithy phraseology).

“We laugh a lot, really. I think that suits me. I like laughing,” Plant admits in the official Saving Grace press statement. “You know, I can’t find any reason to be too serious about anything. I’m not jaded. The sweetness of the whole thing . . . These are sweet people, and they are playing out all the stuff that they could never get out before. They have become unique stylists, and together they seem to have landed in a most interesting place.”

Following Plant’s previous pair of acclaimed LP releases on Nonesuch — September 2014’s lullaby and. . . The Ceaseless Roar and October 2017’s Carry Fire (both of which rate 8.5 for Music and 8.5 for Sound on the MM ratings meter) — Saving Grace brings yet another chapter of the ever-searching artist’s ceaseless roar into the daylight. Produced by Robert Plant and Saving Grace — and recorded between April 2019 and January 2025 in the Cotswolds and on the Welsh Borders — Saving Grace is said to breathe fresh life into a collection of century-old music. (Bonus points to those of you who, like me, instantly conjured Cotswolds locale visuals after reading that, by way of having interacted with the recent 10-episode first season of MobLand. If you’ve yet to see it, Paramount+ is the outlet that’s currently streaming that show’s bloody but beautiful initial season in full rage.)

Saving Grace boasts a veritable treasure trove of songs culled from time both past and passed, from the likes of Memphis Minnie (“Chevrolet”), Bob Mosley of Moby Grape (“It’s a Beautiful Day Today”), Blind Willie Johnson (“Soul of a Man”), The Low Anthem (“Ticket Taker”), Martha Scanlan (“Higher Rock”), Sarah Siskind (“Too Far From You”), and Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk’s Low (the aforementioned “Everybody’s Song”). A trio of traditional arrangements further fill out the Grace LP running order — namely, “As I Roved Out,” “I Never Will Marry,” and “Gospel Plough.”

“Roved” was arranged by Sam Amidon, while “Marry” and “Plough” were arranged by Robert Plant and Saving Grace — the latter two being the latest true-aim arrows in Plant’s Mighty ReArranger quiver, you might even say.

ROBERT PLANT
SAVING GRACE
1LP (Nonesuch)

Side 1
1. Chevrolet
2. As I Roved Out
3. It’s A Beautiful Day Today
4. Soul Of A Man
5. Ticket Taker

Side 2
1. I Never Will Marry
2. Higher Rock
3. Too Far From You
4. Everybody’s Song
5. Gospel Plough