Led Zeppelin Pride Advent Calendar Day 17: Happy pride to the other extremely gay Page/Plant song “Wonderful One,” which Robert and Jimmy apparently wrote within minutes of getting back together in 1995. According to Robert, “We worked with a drum loop to begin with, because we didn’t want anybody else in the room! Except the tape machine. We wanted to see whether or not we could tell the truth, musically, and we did instantly, with ‘Yallah’ and ‘Wonderful One.’” [x.]
According to me, I think it’s much more likely one of them (probably Robert) wrote this song on the piano, and brought it to the other, and here is why. :-) The double neck isn’t just for show, it’s cause the key/chord progressions in the song require two guitars, one of which is in a weird open tuning, while the other has a capo on the first fret. (If you know chords the verses are all over an open G-flat chord, and the chorus alternates between an F minor 7 and a B-flat minor 7.) Basically these chords are weird and insane to play on a guitar in a way that makes me believe it wasn’t written on a guitar. HOWEVER. The chords happen perfectly naturally on the piano! The verses are all black keys [green dots], and to transition to the chorus you just slide your left hand down to the keys right below. The F minor 7 [blue dots] and B-flat minor 7 chords [yellow dots] are very easy shapes to play on the piano, and you hardly have to move your hands at all.
Because of this I think that they made up the “written in a few minutes” explanation for the sake of lore, and it actually already existed at least in some form on the piano. Additionally I think that Robert wrote it--because Jimmy is famous for never using a capo (even when it forced Robert into terrible keys for singing), and it wouldn’t occur to him to write something in a key so alien to the guitar--and brought it to Jimmy, which is kind of cute.