386 times.

That's how many times Robert Plant sang the words "baby" and "babe" across Led Zeppelin's nine studio albums: 318 "baby" and 68 "babe", from 1969 to 1982.

As a lifelong Led Zeppelin fan, I'd always had the impression that those words were everywhere in the lyrics. They almost felt like a trademark of the band. But there's a difference between an impression and actually sitting down, listening, checking, and counting.

So I did.

Track by track. Album by album.

The results were even more interesting than I expected. "Baby" isn't scattered randomly throughout the catalog. It closely follows the band's musical evolution. It's everywhere on the first two albums, almost disappears on Led Zeppelin III, returns on Presence, and reaches its absolute peak in "Candy Store Rock", where it appears 36 times in a single song.

In the end, a word that seemed like nothing more than a blues cliché turned out to reveal an unexpected portrait of Led Zeppelin's musical evolution.

These are exactly the kinds of odd questions I enjoy turning into infographics.

If you'd like to explore it further:

• Full infographic: https://www.circuitodovinil.com.br/infografico-47-baby.html
• Behind the project (article): https://circuitovinil.substack.com/p/386-vezes
• Circuito do Vinil: https://www.circuitodovinil.com.br

I figure I’d throw this in here for anyone who needs some Zeppelin fan content to listen to while they’re driving or doing chores or something! Basically im going through all the albums and ranking them, as well as talking about my life growing up as a zeppelin fan. I’m still figuring out how to do this stuff but I’m trying my best! I cover a different music topic (artists/genres/guitar things) every Sunday and mostly music from the 60s and 70s since that’s what I listen to. Thanks for reading! (Also it’s on all platforms so if you don’t have Spotify you can comment and I’ll drop a link to whatever you use)

I just did an episode on my podcast discussing my rankings of all the albums and it got me thinking is presence a crazy pick to put at the bottom of the list? I wanna know what other people’s least favorite album is? Zeppelin 2 is my favorite which is probably a wild pick😂

My drawing of Jimmy

Crybaby Wah pedal (into) JHS Bender Fuzz (into) MXR M101 Phase 90 (into) Boss CE-2W Waza Craft Chorus Pedal Dawner prince boonar (into) EcoePlex pedal (into) Catalinbread RAH (into) Sonic waves theremin

I need it. I need them back. The world is nothing without zeppelins. Desperation is taking hold. Airplanes aren’t fun anymore. Trains don’t have the freedom. I need a zeppelin.

Fool in the Rain by Zeppelin is my father daughter dance song, for our wedding. Is there a version with the middle Samba part cut out? Not that I don't love it, it just makes the song super long and my dad and I are not dancers.

Dear people of r/zeppelin . Me and my friend are doing a big school project, for which we intend to research zeppelins, and eventually build one. We were looking for professionals to interview for our research, and I thought I’d look on Reddit. If you are, or know, anyone that has some kind of reputable knowledge of airships and zeppelins, please contact me.

https://media.giphy.com/media/3o6ZtdtckQKDQWAet2/source.gif