Certain songs don’t just stay with us—they unsettle us. They crack open our sense of who we are and suggest entirely new ways of living. Bob Dylan’s music did exactly that to Robert Plant when he was still a teenager, long before stadiums and superstardom entered the picture. At the time, Plant was growing up in England’s Black Country, living a familiar life under his parents’ roof. Then Dylan entered the frame, and suddenly staying put felt impossible.
That discovery sparked a restless urge to move. By the age of 16, Plant had packed his bags and left home, setting out on a winding path toward music that would serve as his real education. Over the next few years, he drifted between bands and scraped by with whatever work he could find. One week he’d be stacking shelves at Woolworths or laying tarmac; the next, he’d be fronting blues outfits like the Crawling King Snakes. It was through that scene that he met drummer John Bonham, a partnership that would later prove seismic.
This was the height of Britain’s rhythm-and-blues explosion, and Plant quickly earned a reputation as one of the most arresting vocalists on the circuit. So when Jimmy Page—fresh from the Yardbirds—came calling with a proposal to form a new band, Plant didn’t hesitate. Bonham, more cautious, needed convincing. History would soon reward them both.
Many years later, Plant was invited to curate a selection of songs that had shaped his life. Among them was the Dylan track that had knocked his world sideways as a teenager. Introducing it, Plant recalled how deeply it had struck him at 15, hinting that it may have altered the course of his entire future. His life, he said, felt turned inside out when he first heard a song from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. That song was ‘Down The Highway’.
The track was written during Dylan’s painful separation from Suze Rotolo, his girlfriend at the time—and the woman immortalized beside him on the album’s cover. When Rotolo left New York to study for several months in Perugia, in Italy’s Umbria region, Dylan poured his longing and heartbreak into song. In ‘Down The Highway’, he mourns her absence with raw simplicity, singing of a love packed into a suitcase and carried across the ocean.
That distance inspired a remarkable run of early Dylan compositions. Songs like ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’, ‘Tomorrow Is a Long Time’, and ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’ all grew from the same emotional wound. Dylan later wrote vividly about their first meeting, describing Rotolo with overwhelming intensity—her presence so powerful it seemed to alter the air around him, sending his thoughts spinning before they’d even spoken properly.
The ache of separation reinforced Dylan’s image as a roaming soul, forever pulled toward the horizon by love and longing. That sense of motion—the idea that music could demand you leave everything behind—hit Plant with full force. In ‘Down The Highway’, he heard not just a song, but a blueprint for a life lived on the move.