These Are Led Zeppelin's Sappiest Love Songs, Hands Down

The history of Led Zeppelin doesn't include a whole lot of love songs, especially considering they weren't the most innocent. But when the loud and heavy electric blues and arena rock band that dominated the '70s worked from the heart, it went all the way. Led by howling and prototypical frontman Robert Plant and the supernaturally shredding guitarist Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin usually left tender and sweet subjects like love to the hippies and folkies that preceded its rise. This was a band that was devoted to reinventing old blues standards, and it focused on the subjects therein: heartbreak, carnal pleasures, and the joys of music. When Led Zeppelin did get introspective, it was usually about the occult or the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Only when the members of Led Zeppelin got really moved or really smitten did it tackle the complicated subject of love, in many of its forms. Here are five times when Led Zeppelin showed its softer, vulnerable side, and recorded its most openly emotional — and downright gushy — songs about love.

One of the band's quieter songs, "Thank You," requires a simple, bubbly keyboard-led arrangement so as to showcase Plant's earnest and pleading vocals. The track on 1969's "Led Zeppelin II" surprised fans who were already used to the band's very loud, heavy, and abrasive sound. But this was something different, a gentle ballad that's just one declaration of love after another. Plant wrote the song for Maureen Wilson, whom he'd married about a year earlier.

That's all understandable and adorable, but that doesn't make it any less corny. It's called "Thank You," after all — and one person solicitously lays it on really thick, in which they thank another person for loving them. The lyrics are loaded with ideas out of a Poetry 101 textbook that are such well-known clichés that only someone within the early throes of deep love wouldn't recognize as being hoary and cringey. For example, Plant proclaims that his love will endure after the sun is dead and the mountains have fallen down, which will certainly only happen long after the world stops smiling so hard, the musician suggests. There also exist some very obvious rhymes for some simple sentiments — Plant pairs "rain" with "pain," and "love is strong" with "there is no wrong."

Robert Plant would call himself a major fan of Joni Mitchell, and after following her career and watching her perform, he became so smitten — or at least enamored with the idea of her, or her creative persona — that he was moved to write a song for Led Zeppelin. Inspired by "California," a track on Mitchell's album "Blue," Plant led the way for the composition of "A Guide to California," which evolved into "Going to California," recorded for Led Zeppelin's fourth, untitled album, in 1971.

Plant starts off by declaring his intent to move to California, partially to leave behind a terrible girlfriend (who consumed all of his drugs and alcohol) in favor of an idealized and celebrated West Coast, where he just knows he's bound to meet a newer, more perfect lover, one with kind eyes and who weaves flowers into her hair, in the hippie style of the time. Following some poetic waxing about the natural wonders of the world, and California's in particular, Plant gets back to the matter at hand: praising and declaring his love for "his queen without a king." He provides an image of someone who certainly seems a lot like the beloved Mitchell, as she sings and plays guitar. But he can't help but get really sappy, wondering if his dream woman even exists, if he'll ever get to truly give all of us love over to another.

"Sappy" just refers to overly and openly emotionally wrought material. The feelings that sappy songs try to convey are things like joy and gratitude, but such works can also explore tough and unbearable emotions. "All My Love" is a devastating gut-punch of a song, because it lives in the place where parental love collides with powerful, unspeakable grief. In one of the most tragic stories about Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant's son, Karac, died at the age of five in 1977, and in tribute, he wrote this song that appeared on Led Zeppelin's 1979 album "In Through the Out Door." It's as happy as it is profoundly sad. "I think it was just paying tribute to the joy that he gave us as a family, and in a crazy way, still does," Plant told AXS TV of the song.

Plant's character in "All My Love" is reeling, rattling off striking, visually oriented fragments that hint at sadness — he sings of chasing "a feather in the wind" and threads that are endless, not unlike the enduring ocean tides. He worries about both eventually forgetting his son and if the intense mourning period will ever cease. More direct and more likely to bring a tear to one's eye: Most of the song is a "toast" to Plant's boy, as he tenderly devotes every last bit of love he's ever had to the deceased.