All four members of Led Zeppelin have agreed that "Kashmir" is one of their best musical achievements. Robert Plant said it was "One of my favorites... it was so positive, lyrically." Jimmy Page has answered the question "What is the greatest Zeppelin riff of all" by citing this song.
Plant wrote the lyrics in 1973 while driving through the Sahara Desert on the way to the National Festival of folklore in Morocco. Kashmir is in Southern Asia; he was nowhere near it. In Mojo magazine, September 2010, Plant explained: "'Kashmir' came from a trip Jimmy and me made down the Moroccan Atlantic coast, from Agadir down to Sidi Ifni. We were just the same as the other hippies really." The original title was "Driving To Kashmir."
Speaking with Dan Rather in 2018, Robert Plant said: "It was a great achievement to take such a monstrously dramatic musical piece and find a lyric that was ambiguous enough, and a delivery that was not over-pumped. It was almost the antithesis of the music, this lyric and this vocal delivery that was just about enough to get in there."
