Robert Plant – Two Coats

He has been singing it on stage since 2019 and only now let anyone record it, six days before Nashville hands him a lifetime achievement award

Robert Plant’s explanation for the record he released on September 10 is about as plain as an explanation gets: these were songs the band would normally play on stage, and they decided to record them. One of them is Two Coats, which he describes as a Ralph Stanley song, and which he and Saving Grace have been performing since the group came together in 2019. The video went up on his own channel; the EP it belongs to, Saving Grace: All That Glitters…, arrives digitally on October 9 through Nonesuch.

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Saving Grace is not a backing band and the distinction matters to how the record sounds. The group formed on the Welsh borderlands in 2019 and spent the lockdown years playing together, which is how Plant describes the genesis — his usual wandering stopped, and the music came out of staying still. Suzi Dian sings, and sings with him rather than behind him. Tony Kelsey plays guitar, Matt Worley banjo and guitar, Barney Morse-Brown cello, Oli Jefferson drums. Their debut album came out on Nonesuch in September 2025. Two Coats is built around the two voices, with the instruments kept back far enough that you can hear the room.

The song itself carries the ambiguity that follows a lot of this material. It is bound up with Ralph Stanley, the Virginia bluegrass singer whose voice reached a wider audience through O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and trade coverage of the release has split on whether Stanley wrote it or inherited it. That uncertainty is part of the tradition rather than a gap in the paperwork. What is documented is that Plant found it, kept it in the live set for six years without recording it, and has now put it down with the arrangement the band worked out on stage.

The EP has already had one life. Nonesuch pressed All That Glitters… for Record Store Day on April 18, 2026, in a limited vinyl run that sold through, and the digital release in October is what gives it a general audience. The other three tracks map the territory precisely: the traditional The Blackest Crow, Gillian Welch’s Orphan Girl, and Poison by Bert Jansch, the Scottish guitarist whose playing shaped British folk and, by a fairly direct route, shaped Led Zeppelin. Two anonymous songs and two written by people Plant has spent his life listening to.

Timing gives the release more weight than a four-track companion EP would normally carry. The Americana Music Association presents Plant with its Lifetime Achievement Award at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on September 16, and the Up the Sharp End tour with Saving Grace and Suzi Dian opens on September 18 and runs through October 15, with Rosie Flores as special guest. For an English singer who came to this music through imported records, an award in that building amounts to the tradition acknowledging him back.

There is a habit of treating everything Plant does now as a detour from the band he left in 1980. It has been the other way around for a long time. The folk and Americana work is not the epilogue — it is the larger part of the career by duration, and Saving Grace is the fullest version of it, a group he sings in rather than fronts. Two Coats is a song nobody can definitively claim, sung by a man who could have kept singing his own back catalog for the rest of his life and did not.