This is how you pay tribute to greatness.
When you encounter something glorious, something that lifts your soul and takes you to heaven, something that changes your perspective and lets you see the world in a new way, you might just want to tell everyone about it.
What makes a “Stairway” tribute glorious?
But you don’t just try to mimic. Because you know you’re not the original, and you can never just replicate it in quite the same way. No, it was an amazing, life-changing moment. And anyway, you want to tell the world about how you experienced it, and what it meant to you. You take ownership of it. And if someone didn’t know any better they’d say it was your own, until you tell them that no, someone else did the work first. They were a teacher, and you’re a student, but you want to spread the good news. You want to evangelize.
So you go to the heart of it. And you figure out what made it so incredible to begin with. And maybe you get the very best group together you can find. People who had the same experience as you did, or something like it, who want to make it known too. And then you tell the story. In your own voice. With your whole heart and soul. And if you really believe it, people will stand up and shout their assent.
You want to know what that kind of tribute might sound like? Then let me present to you Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart paying tribute to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.1 It is glorious:
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Cover photo courtesy of flickr user Eddie Virago
Image above courtesy of flickr user am4ndas
- This is from the 2012 Kennedy Center Honors, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet Ecosystem, it’s showed up once again in my newsfeed recently. ↩
