How To Write Like Led Zeppelin
Ritual, Riot, Repeat
It’s a lie that you can’t be a maniac of a writer.
But there’s no shortcut. No app, no AI, no hack will do the work for you.
AI won’t make you a great writer—because it can’t give you insight.
And insight? That’s equal parts synthesis (a lost art, but that’s for another Substack) and knowing the right things to be mad about.
What should you write about?
Easy. Whatever irks you.
How should you write about it?
Well, Miles Davis said it best:
“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”
That’s the synthesis part.
You can’t download that. Grok can’t hand it to you. That’s your magic—your convergence point.
And that’s why I keep banging the drum on being a Multipotentialite.
That’s the secret sauce behind deep synthesis—when all your weird fascinations collide into something uniquely you.
Case in point: I watched a killer documentary on Led Zeppelin the other day.
What struck me most wasn’t the sex, drugs, or stadiums—it was the ritual behind the chaos.
Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones were session players.
Serious, 9-to-5, orchestral pros.
They played on the Goldfinger theme, for crying out loud.
Page would show up to live studio sessions, flip sheet music on the fly, and nail it in one take. That’s how tight they were.
That kind of life? It's stable. Respectable. You buy a house, raise kids, and clock in with the best musicians in the business.
So when Page and Jones told their fellow session vets—many old enough to have museum exhibits—that they were quitting to start a rock band, the reaction was universal:
“Are you insane?”
They had steady work. Prestige. Craft. And they walked away from all of it.
They found Robert Plant, who wouldn’t join unless they hired John Bonham.
They rent a boathouse, rehearse, fly to Denmark, play one show as the Yardbirds, come back, write an album, and tour the U.S. for three months.
The debut record explodes.
They’re suddenly massive.
While on tour, they record Led Zeppelin II in fragments—hotel rooms, borrowed studios, backstage—then drop it a year later.
It debuts at #1.
Knocks Abbey Road off the top of the charts.
What makes their story powerful isn’t just the music—it’s the paradox at the heart of it all:
Ritual meets chaos.
That’s the magic formula.
If you’re a writer, don’t look for balance.
Look for collision—between structure and spontaneity, discipline and danger, theory and rage.
That’s where the gold is.
Here’s the three things you’ve got to master to unleash your writing superpower—and the cool thing is that everyone can do this:
