Songfacts®:

• Robert Plant's return from America to his native West Midlands in England helped inspire several of the tracks on Lullaby And… The Ceaseless Roar. He sings on this piano ballad of being, "drawn to the western shore." Plant explained the lyric to Billboard magazine: "Everyone that knows me forgives me my madness. (Laughs.) They say, "Oh, there's a feeling he gets when he looks to the west." But it's true. It's very potent for me."
  
  "I know that my great-grandfather was from here, and my great-grandfather's great-grandfather was from here," he added. "There's great resonance in that. However, when it gets cold I'm heading to Morocco."
• The piano-and-voice ballad was recorded starkly by Plant in a chapel.
• Plant told Mojo magazine that the song originated with something written by the keyboardist of his backing band The Sensational Space Shifters. "Johnny Baggot, who is a virtuoso pianist, had written that lovely verse structure and I took it up to Worcestershire with me," said the former Zeppelin vocalist. "My granddaughter had been singing at my place and the little PA system that I've had for years there was still set up, so I had the flexibility to walk around the room with a SM58 microphone singing to John's backing track."
  
  "I could hear a Welsh choir on the song, but they wanted me to write down the dots and I didn't see it that way," Plant added. "In the end I did the backing vocals myself. The last thing I wanted was to get too scientific."