How Led Zeppelin Wrote Kashmir: The Story Behind One Of Their Greatest Songs

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Robert Plant and Jimmy Page perform on stage, one singing with a mic and the other playing a guitar. Black and yellow tones. Text: How Led Zeppelin Wrote Kashmir.

When Led Zeppelin released Physical Graffiti in February 1975, Kashmir stood apart from everything else on the record. It's over eight and a half minutes long, built on a guitar tuning borrowed from Middle Eastern stringed instruments, and it sounds like nothing else in rock. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham, and John Paul Jones each left their mark on it at different times and in different places, and the whole thing came together over roughly two years. The result is arguably the band's greatest studio achievement.

The Guitar Tuning That Started It All

In 1973, Page was experimenting with DADGAD tuning, sometimes called D modal tuning. It's a tuning with deep roots in Celtic and Middle Eastern folk music, where the guitar's strings are tuned D-A-D-G-A-D rather than the standard E-A-D-G-B-E. The open chord it creates has a droning, ambiguous quality that doesn't resolve neatly into major or minor, which is a big part of why Kashmir sounds so hypnotic. Page hit upon the song's central rising and falling riff while exploring what the tuning could do, and that riff became the spine of everything that followed.

It's worth noting that Page used a modified Danelectro 59DC Double Cutaway Standard guitar for Kashmir on some of Led Zeppelin's live tours. He's demonstrated the riff on that same guitar in interviews, including a memorable session with Jack White and The Edge for Davis Guggenheim's 2009 film It Might Get Loud. The Danelectro's light strings and slightly hollow body gave the riff a particular resonance that worked well with the DADGAD tuning.

Two Men, a Drum Kit, and a Country House

The core backing track for Kashmir was recorded at Headley Grange, a former Victorian workhouse in Hampshire that Led Zeppelin used as a rehearsal and recording space on several occasions. It's the same building where Bonham recorded the thunderous drum intro to When the Levee Breaks.

For Kashmir, it was just Page and Bonham in the room together. Bonham's drum part is one of the most distinctive things about the song: it plays in 4/4 time while the guitar and string arrangement sits in a 3/4 pattern, which creates the song's lurching, overlapping feel. It's not an accident, and it's not easy to play. The two rhythms lock together and then drift apart in a way that keeps the listener slightly off-balance throughout.

Robert Plant Writes the Lyrics in the Sahara

The lyrics came from somewhere very far removed from a recording studio. Plant wrote them while he and Page were driving through the Sahara Desert in southern Morocco, somewhere in the region of Tan-Tan and Goulimine near the Atlantic coast. The landscape apparently had a profound effect on Plant. The sense of scale, of distance, of a world that dwarfs human concerns, found its way directly into lines about journeying toward an unknown horizon. Neither Plant nor Page had ever actually been to Kashmir, the Himalayan region on the border of India and Pakistan. The title isn't meant to be geographically specific. It's more about an idea of somewhere remote, mysterious, and vast.

In a 1995 radio interview with Australian journalist Richard Kingsmill, Plant described what it felt like to write to Page's music: "It was an amazing piece of music to write to, and an incredible challenge for me. Because of the time signature, the whole deal of the song is not grandiose, but powerful. It required some kind of epithet, or abstract lyrical setting about the whole idea of life being an adventure and being a series of illuminated moments. But everything is not what you see. It was quite a task, because I couldn't sing it. It was like the song was bigger than me."

John Paul Jones Adds the Orchestra

The string and horn arrangements came last, added by bassist and keyboard player John Paul Jones the following year. Jones had a background in session work and orchestral arrangement before joining Led Zeppelin, having worked as an arranger for artists including Donovan, the Rolling Stones, and Lulu. That experience shows in Kashmir. The strings don't embellish the song so much as they become part of its architecture, moving in the same cyclical, overlapping patterns as the guitar and drums. The arrangement makes the song feel genuinely epic in a way that a purely rock instrumentation wouldn't have achieved.

Page has said the string parts were written to mirror what the guitar was doing, which is why everything in the song feels locked together even when the different rhythmic layers are technically fighting each other. The Morocco influence is also audible in the orchestration. Jones drew on the sound of North African and Middle Eastern music without directly copying it, which is why the song feels exotic without feeling like pastiche.

Why Kashmir Still Sounds Unlike Anything Else

Kashmir appeared on Physical Graffiti in February 1975 and has remained one of Led Zeppelin's most performed and most discussed songs ever since. It became a regular fixture in their live sets, including the 1977 US tour and the 1979 Knebworth shows. Plant has called it his favourite Led Zeppelin song on multiple occasions, which is saying something given the depth of their catalogue.

What makes it endure is probably the combination of things that makes it strange. The DADGAD tuning gives it an open, unresolved sound. The competing time signatures give it a physical weight and momentum. The Moroccan landscape that inspired Plant's lyrics gives it a sense of scale that feels genuinely earned rather than manufactured. And the two-year assembly process, with each member contributing at different times and places, somehow produced something that sounds completely unified. Kashmir didn't happen all at once. It accumulated, and that's probably why it still feels like it's building toward something every time it plays.