All My Love. Bettye LaVette. 2010. ANTI-

 When Led Zeppelin released their seventh studio album in late summer, 1979, All My Love received so much airplay in the DFW radio market that for years afterwards I was actually convinced that I liked the song. I finally became disabused of this false impression when I recently heard it played one too many times. All My Love is overly sentimental, but its real problem can be heard in Robert Plant’s vocal delivery; he sounds lazily distracted, as if the pretty lyric he’s written has failed to hold his attention. By contrast, Bettye LaVette surrenders to the lyric and is possessed by it. What’s revealed is the intensely sweet and tortuous longing at the heart of sexual desire and the messy complications that come to dominate our lives because of it. LaVette is such an interpretive master that she even blows the cobwebs off of the lyric’s metaphors, transforming them from mere tropes into lyric poetry. Her version of All My Love is timeless, too; hearing it as you age, when your sexual drive is just a shade of its former brilliance, your new perspective will color your experience of the song a deeper, richer passion. Using only the blues—what Led Zeppelin once did—LaVette finally makes dramatic sense of a plea for intimacy.


Nov 13 021

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