Stairway to Heaven” is a song by the English band Led Zeppelin, released in late 1971. The song originated in 1970 when Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were spending time at Bron-Yr-Aur, a remote cottage in Wales, following Led Zeppelin’s fifth American tour. According to Page, he wrote the music “over a long period, the first part coming at Bron-Yr-Aur one night”. Page always kept a cassette recorder around, and the idea for “Stairway to Heaven” came together from bits of taped music. The first attempts at lyrics, written by Robert Plant next to an evening log fire at Headley Grange, were partly spontaneously improvised and Page claimed, “a huge percentage of the lyrics were written there and then”. Jimmy Page was strumming the chords, and Robert Plant had a pencil and paper.
“Stairway to Heaven” was recorded beginning in December 1970 at Island Records in London. The song was completed by the addition of lyrics by Plant in 1971. Page then returned to Island Studios to record his guitar solo.The complete studio recording was released on Led Zeppelin IV in November 1971. The band’s record label, Atlantic Records, wanted to issue it as a single, but the band’s manager Peter Grant refused requests to do so in both 1972 and 1973. This led many people to buy the fourth album as if it were the single.
“Stairway to Heaven” is described as progressive rock, folk rock and hard rock. The song consists of several distinct sections, beginning with a quiet introduction on a finger-picked six-string guitar and four recorders in a Renaissance music style (ending at 2:15) and gradually moving into a slow electric middle section (2:16–5:33), then a long guitar solo (5:34–6:44), before the faster final section (6:45–7:45), ending with a short vocals-only epilogue. Plant sings the opening, middle and epilogue sections in his mid vocal range, but sings the hard rock section in his higher range which borders on falsetto.
Written in the key of A minor, the song opens with an arpeggiated, finger picked guitar chord progression with a chromatic descending bassline A-G♯-G-F♯-F. John Paul Jones contributed overdubbed wooden bass recorders in the opening section (he used a Mellotron and, later, a Yamaha CP70B Grand Piano and Yamaha GX1 to synthesise this arrangement in live performances) and a Hohner Electra-Piano in the middle section.
The sections build with more guitar layers, each complementary to the intro, with the drums entering at 4:18. The extended Jimmy Page guitar solo in the song’s final section was played for the recording on a 1959 Fender Telecaster given to him by Jeff Beck plugged into a Supro amplifier. Three different improvised solos were recorded, with Page agonising about which to keep. Page later revealed, “I did have the first phrase worked out, and then there was the link phrase. I did check them out beforehand before the tape ran.”
The world radio premiere of “Stairway to Heaven” was recorded at the Paris Cinema on 1 April 1971, in front of a live studio audience, and broadcast three days later on the BBC. The song was performed at almost every subsequent Led Zeppelin, only being omitted on rare occasions when shows were cut short for curfews or technical issues. The band’s final performance of the song was in Berlin on 7 July 1980, which was also their last full-length concert until 10 December 2007 at London’s O2 Arena; the version was the longest, lasting almost 15 minutes, including a seven-minute guitar solo.
“Stairway to Heaven” continues to top radio lists of the greatest rock songs, including a 2006 Guitar World readers poll of greatest guitar solos. On the 20th anniversary of the original release of the song, it was announced via U.S. radio sources that the song had logged up an estimated 2,874,000 radio plays. As of 2000, the song had been broadcast on radio over three million times. In 1990, a St. Petersburg, Florida station kicked off its all-Led Zeppelin format by playing “Stairway to Heaven” for 24 hours straight. It is also the biggest-selling single piece of sheet music in rock history, clocking up an average of 15,000 copies yearly. In total, over one million copies have been sold.
