Album: Led Zeppelin II
Year: 1969
Conveniently placed at the end of side one of Led Zeppelin II so it could be easily skipped by high-school boys who didn’t want to deal with the overt sentimentality and acoustic guitars — god forbid this song somehow blasted from your car in a parking lot! — “Thank You” is probably the first place where Led Zeppelin truly showed their mastery of non-heavy songs as well.
All of these years later, it’s clearly the first power ballad, fully embracing all of the tropes acoustic guitars, lovelorn lyrics, extra instrumentation, shifts from quiet to loud — that have made power ballads the objects of equal parts of love and loathing.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #892: Led Zeppelin – “Thank You”