Immigrant Song
by Led Zeppelin
- 112
- BPM
- B major
- Key
- 1B
- Camelot
- 57
- Danceability
- 2
- Acousticness
Robert Plant wrote the lyrics to "Immigrant Song" after the band's concert in Reykjavik, Iceland, which opened a tour of Iceland, Bath, and Germany in the summer of 1970. The day before Led Zeppelin arrived, the civil servants all went on strike, and the gig was about to be canceled. The university prepared a concert hall instead. Plant remembered the response from the kids vividly. The band, he said, had come "from the land of the ice and snow", as guests of the Icelandic government on a cultural mission.
Six days after Reykjavik, Led Zeppelin played the song live for the first time, at the Bath Festival. It opened Led Zeppelin III in 1970 and was released as a single. A repeating, staccato riff by Jimmy Page and John Bonham starts it, and John Paul Jones comes in on the ninth measure. After eight repeats, Plant's wailing cry sets in. The album version begins with a very faint count-off and hiss, which was feedback from an echo unit. The single version trims it.
The lyrics mention war-making and Valhalla. A phrase from them became the title of Stephen Davis's biography of the band, Hammer of the Gods.
Immigrant Song runs at 112 BPM, the tempo of pop, funk and disco-leaning dance. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.14 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 536 ms. It is in B major, Camelot 1B, which shares its notes with Ab minor and mixes cleanly with E major and F# major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.