Are there backwards messages in “Stairway To Heaven”?
You’re far from the first to ask. This rumor has persisted ever since a California committee of parents and religious leaders set out to prove that rock music was leading our children down the path to the devil. For reasons still unknown to rational minds, they decided to play some albums backwards, and professed to hear all sorts of messages in songs like Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust,” anything and everything by Styx and ELO, Rush’s “Anthem,” the Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown,” Skynyrd’s “Freebird,” The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” and most notably the (at that point) most-requested rock song of all time, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven.” A definition is useful here — “backmasking” is the process of either: 1) recording a backwards message on a track meant to be played forwards, or 2) the “hiding” of messages within forward phrases so that, when played backwards, another phrase is revealed. So does backmasking exist? Andy Johns, the producer of _IV_, says that not only is
