Sixty years ago, Jimmy Page was a guitarist for the Yardbirds, but during that time he wrote a song that would become a Led Zeppelin classic.
“Tangerine,” from the 1970 album Led Zeppelin III, is a reflective acoustic guitar ballad about love, loss, and the passage of time. The song’s delicate guitar melody and yearning lyrics are in stark contrast to the album’s hard-rocking tracks such as “Immigrant Song” and “Out on the Tiles.”
Written by Jimmy Page, the music for the song was penned during the musician’s Yardbirds days. A demo was recorded under the title “Knowing That I’m Losing You,” with Keith Relf on vocals performing early lyrics.
“We tried a version with the Yardbirds and there was a different chorus,” Page once told Mojo in an interview. “It kinda got lost. I had songs I had written down the years, but I didn’t push them, I was waiting to see whether they would fit, and, on the third [Zeppelin] album, it fitted perfectly. It’s this little vignette with the pedal steel on there.”
“Tangerine” was written following Page’s brief romantic relationship with singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon in the mid-1960s.
“I’d written parts of that song even before I’d joined [The Yardbirds] but that song is definitely the result of us having met,” Page confirmed to Mojo. “I think the original words were different.”
In the book Zigzag The Road to Rock, Page said of “Tangerine,” “I wrote that song years earlier after an emotional upheaval, and I just changed a few of the lyrics. I first tried recording that with the Yardbirds.”
DeShannon, a prolific songwriter behind hits such as “When You Walk in the Room” and “Bette Davis Eyes,” once admitted she had no idea if Page wrote “Tangerine” about her.
“If it was written for me, I’m honored,” she told The Guardian in 2023.
While the Yardbirds version of the song never went anywhere, Page explained why he didn’t immediately whip out the reworked version of “Tangerine” for the first Led Zeppelin album in 1969.
“I really knew what it was that I wanted to do,” the legendary guitarist once told Music Radar in an interview. “If you think about it, on the third album there’s ‘Tangerine,’ but I wrote ‘Tangerine’ back in The Yardbirds. So I’d waited an amount of time. I didn’t stick it on the first album or the second. I waited until it would fit in with the right texture of everything else. It fits great in the third album. So, yeah, I had a bit of a plan.”
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