"Tangerine"

The seventh track off of "Led Zeppelin III" is a track attribute solely to Jimmy Page titled, "Tangerine". The song had its genesis as a Yardbirds tune titled, "Knowing That I'm Losing You" which opens with the familiar line, "Measuring a summer's day...", and has a number of other lyrics that would be included in the latter track. It has been said that Keith Relf, lead singer of The Yardbirds, wrote some of the lyrics to "Knowing That I'm Losing You" but he never confirmed this before his untimely death in 1976. It has also been said that Jimmy wrote the song about his one time love Jackie DeShannon, but this also has never been confirmed.

One of the aspects of this song that sets it apart from the rest of Led Zeppelin III is the inclusion of a pedal steel guitar. Jimmy would later comment about the inclusion of the instrument on "Tangerine" in an interview in 1977: "On the first LP there's a pedal steel. I had never played steel before, but I just picked it up. There's a lot of things I do first time around that I haven't done before. In fact, I hadn't touched a pedal steel from the first album to the third. It's a bit of a pinch really from the things that Chuck Berry did. Nevertheless, it fits. I use pedal steel in 'Your Time Is Gonna Come.' It sounds like a slide or something. It's more out of tune on the first album because I hadn't got a kit to put it together."

Like much of the third Led Zeppelin album, the song was recorded in 1970 at the Headley Grange house and was produced by Page and engineered by Andy Johns. One unique little footnote about this song is the fact that it was mixed at Olympic Sound Studios rather than Island Studios like the rest of "Led Zeppelin III".

In terms of structure "Tangerine" is quite a complex song actually as it constantly changes tempos throughout the entirety of the number. Through the course of the song there is a basic Am G D C progression for the verses before moving on to G C D progression for the chorus. This would be the second to last song Page would write without any contribution from Robert Plant.