3 Things to Know About Led Zeppelin's "The Rain Song"

It started as a simple folk piece Jimmy Page originally had a gentle acoustic guitar idea, and Robert Plant’s lyrics fit it perfectly.

The band transformed it into an epic They added Mellotron, a crescendo, and a heavy middle section, turning it into the eight-minute track on Houses of the Holy.

The folk origin made the hard-rock parts hit harder The quiet sections wouldn’t be as powerful without the contrast. The original acoustic idea is still present in John Paul Jones’s Mellotron arrangement.