Record Store Day honors Robert Plant
Record Store Day named Robert Plant its 2026 Record Store Legend and tied the honor to a new four‑track EP — Saving Grace: All That Glitters — recorded with Saving Grace and singer Suzi Dian, while Plant also visited Spillers Records ahead of the event. The 19th annual Record Store Day falls on April 18, when independent shops worldwide will hold parties, in‑store performances and limited releases — for example, Syracuse’s Sound Garden plans to open at 9 a.m. that day. (goldminemag.com) (gratefulweb.com) (billboard.com) (syracuse.com)
Robert Plant is getting a new kind of rock-star tribute this month: Record Store Day picked him as its 2026 Record Store Legend and paired the honor with a new vinyl-only release tied to the event on Saturday, April 18. (recordstoreday.com) The new record is a four-track extended play called *Saving Grace: All That Glitters...*, and it was recorded with Plant’s current group Saving Grace and singer Suzi Dian rather than as a Led Zeppelin nostalgia package. (nonesuch.com) Record Store Day’s release page says the extended play contains four new studio recordings: “Blackest Crow,” “Poison,” “Orphan Girl,” and “She Cried.” (recordstoreday.com) That track list tells you what Plant is doing in 2026: “Poison” comes from folk guitarist Bert Jansch, “Orphan Girl” comes from Gillian Welch, and the project leans into the folk and Americana material that Saving Grace has been building around. (recordstoreday.com) (recordstoreday.co.uk) Plant also marked the announcement by visiting Spillers Records in Cardiff, which Billboard described as the world’s oldest record store, to oversee installation of his official Record Store Legend plaque. (billboard.com) (recordstoreday.com) That stop mattered because Record Store Day is built around shops, not streaming platforms: the event says it began in 2007 with independent record store owners and employees, and the first Record Store Day was held on April 19, 2008. (recordstoreday.com) The organization says nearly 1,400 independently owned stores in the United States now take part, alongside thousands more internationally, which is why a single April release can turn into a global in-store event. (recordstoreday.com) On April 18, stores will use the Plant release the way they use hundreds of other exclusives: as a reason to get people through the door early for limited vinyl, live sets, and all-day crowds. (goldminemag.com) (gratefulweb.com) You can already see the local version of that scramble in Syracuse, where The Sound Garden said its Record Store Day event will start at 9 a.m. on Saturday, April 18, at 310 West Jefferson Street. (syracuse.com) So the headline is not just that Robert Plant got an award. It is that one of rock’s most recognizable singers is being used exactly the way Record Store Day likes to work in 2026: a familiar name, a scarce physical record, and a reason to line up at an independent shop before the doors open. (recordstoreday.com) (syracuse.com)
