There’s a reason I’m not a journalist: It is quite possible that I have the worst “news judgment” ever.

More than once, during those periods that I’ve actually done a few essays or reviews for news organizations, an editor has gently had to explain to me that you can’t really write about something once its moment is passed: The book’s been out too long, the anniversary is over, everyone has forgotten this by now.

And as we all know, the window these days closes in a matter of mere hours—basically when I am still lumbering around trying to figure out how I feel about it in the first place.

Which is of course why I want to talk, now, about the photograph of Robert Plant at last week’s Grammys.

I say “photograph” because I didn’t actually watch the awards show. It came on around the time my family collectively goes to bed, mostly because my husband goes to work at 3:30 a.m.—naturally, for a news organization.

The next morning at oh-dark-thirty, though, there it was on the front page of Yahoo: The 60-year-old former lead singer for Led Zeppelin, with bluegrass singer and violinist Alison Krauss, accepting just one of the four Grammy awards for their stunning bluegrass/crossover/Americana album Raising Sand.

The first thing I thought, and I can hardly believe it, was: That man is Sexy. Yes, if you have never taken a close look at the male voice behind the snippets of “Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)” and “Please Read the Letter” that were played endlessly on public radio during 2008, do a quick Google search and you’ll see what I mean.

That man is Sexy.

It was not always thus. If you look back at the photograph on the back cover of the eponymous first Led Zeppelin album, released in 1969—the one with the famous black and white image of the crash of the Hindenburg on the front—you’ll see a quartet of impossibly young faces, with Plant in the top right quadrant, head topped with a froth of curly blond ringlets. The band’s members look oddly dough-like and blank: “formless and void” is the phrase that comes to my mind as I look at it from forty years’ distance.

At the time, Robert Plant was 21 years old.

In the photographs from last week’s Grammys, he still has the head full of blond ringlets (if anything, wilder than ever), but now his face is deeply lined, so grooved that it looks almost geologic. There’s nothing cosmetic-looking about it, despite whatever ministrations he’s been provided by his aesthetic handlers. His worn looks bear the august imprint of experience—as if he had actually transformed into one of those Norse or Welsh mythological figures that Led Zeppelin used to sing about.

The picture from the Grammys showed something even further, I think, which is that the face can reveal the results of a life lived with integrity. I don’t mean a life of virtue, necessarily. The smile on Plant’s face revealed a man that looked pretty jovial and happy: clearly, he was having a good time, something that was confirmed in the media reports I read. (You probably watched it, so please feel free to comment.)

What I saw in his open expression, though, was something you don’t often see in the faces of public figures—such as, say, Hank Paulson or Rod Blagojevich—a kind of clear-eyed self-acceptance of himself, and humility.

That’s it: the man looked humble. As though he were amazed to be standing where he stood.

That attitude was reflected in the remarks by Plant that I later read when I was continuing to mull over why that photograph had struck me so. Filled with praise for his Raising Sand partner Alison Krauss, Plant credited the album’s brilliance to the creative tension arising from the fact that he and Krauss “come from such different places on the map,” musically. He stated, roughly, that while his background with Led Zeppelin, like so many other English bands of the Sixties, had always led him to conceive of American music strictly in terms of the African-American musical experience—as in Delta blues and R+B—Krauss had introduced him to that other great strand that flows down through white Southern folk culture.

It was the statement of a keen mind betraying a willingness to learn, and wonder.

And in the marriage of these two American musical traditions, some great music was made. Listen to Raising Sand and see what I mean.

But you should also go back and listen to a good two, three, or four hours of Led Zeppelin, too—especially if you are under thirty and only know the band from hearing “All My Love” or “Houses of the Holy” on some classic rock station while you’re waiting for your car at Jiffy Lube.

Led Zeppelin’s evocations of the Delta blues are, to my mind, among the best of the British Sixties interpretations. When I was a ninth grader in boarding school in snowy New England, just the sound of “When the Levee Breaks” from Led Zeppelin IV could summon up my Mississippi Delta origins like nothing else. Take a listen to the “You Shook Me,” or “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” (By comparison, the Rolling Stones’ efforts to capture a sort of bluesy street menace in “Monkey Man,” “Midnight Rambler,” and others sound so caricatured now as to seem almost racist.)

But Zeppelin was always more than just the blues: There’s a whole acoustic body of their work with fey mythological and folkloric obsessions, drawn from English, Scottish, and Welsh folk culture—check out “The Battle of Evermore” with its haunting mandolin.

It is, ironically, that same folk culture that ultimately came across the Atlantic Ocean, and became the Appalachian culture that yielded bluegrass: that new musical terrain that Robert Plant, decades later, would be ready and humble enough to encounter.

Humble enough to take the influences of the past and make them new.

To hold time, in the midst of all the spinning fads and news, and yet transform it.

Now that is Sexy.