Stairway to Heaven is a song by the English rock band Led Zeppelin. It was composed by the band's guitarist Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant for their untitled fourth studio album. The song is widely regarded as one of the greatest rock songs of all time.
The song consists of three distinct sections, beginning with a quiet introduction in an almost Renaissance music style and gradually moving into a slow middle section before the uptempo hard rock final section. Stairway is described as progressive rock, folk rock and hard rock. Stairway to Heaven was voted number three in a list of the 100 Greatest Rock Songs. The song originated in 1970 when Page and Plant were spending time at Bron-Yr-Aur, a remote cottage in Wales, following Led Zeppelin's fifth American concert tour. The complete studio recording was released in November 1971. The band's record label, Atlantic Records, wanted to issue it as a single, but the band's manager Peter Grant refused requests to do so in both 1972 and 1973. This led many people to buy the fourth album as if it were the single. By 1975, the song had a regular place as the finale of every Led Zeppelin concert, however, after their concert tour of the USA in 1977, Plant began to tire of Stairway to Heaven: "There's only so many times you can sing it and mean it ... It just became sanctimonious.” In a January 1982 broadcast of the Trinity Broadcasting Network television program Praise the Lord hosted by Paul Crouch, it was claimed that hidden messages were contained in many popular rock songs through a technique called backmasking. One example of such hidden messages that was prominently cited was in Stairway to Heaven. The alleged message, which occurs during the middle section of the song when played backward, was purported to contain the Satanic references. The band itself has mostly ignored such claims, responding to the allegations by stating: "Our turntables only play in one direction—forwards.”
