Barney Hoskyns

Barney Hoskyns approaches popular music through criticism, biography, oral history, and the archive he helped build at Rock's Backpages. Led Zeppelin IV focuses that range on the band's untitled fourth album, examining the circumstances of its recording, the mixture of folk, blues, hard rock, and studio experimentation, and the record's unusually durable cultural presence. The study appeared from Rodale in 2006 within its Rock of Ages series. Hoskyns treats the album as a sequence rather than reducing it to Stairway to Heaven, giving space to the contrasts among Black Dog, The Battle of Evermore, When the Levee Breaks, and the quieter Going to California. His account connects production choices and band dynamics to the record listeners eventually received. Hoskyns later expanded his work on the group with the oral history Trampled Under Foot. In Led Zeppelin IV, the narrower album study lets him show how eight tracks made at several locations came to function as a unified statement without an ordinary title on its original sleeve.