Mastodon has released a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” in honor of their late manager Nick John. According to The PRP, the band performed the cover for the first time at John’s funeral last month, which then followed with a studio recording and a recording of the performance  from the funeral. Their drummer,  Brann Dailor , recently spoke with Revolver, discussing the influence of picking the classic Zeppelin song. “Nick was just such a huge Zeppelin fan, and we thought it would just be the perfect thing — “Stairway to Heaven” is the perfect song to do acoustically, in the church, with everyone else. Everyone knows at least some of the words to “Stairway to Heaven,” so they can sing along, so it made the most sense.” Check out the band’s cover below.

The studio version of the song will be getting the double sided treatment. It will be released on a 1o inch and all of the proceeds from the album going to research for pancreatic cancer. The band plans to have John’s face as the album cover and calling it “Stairway to Nick John,” with a release date yet to be announced.

Dailor states “The thing that’s most exciting to me about it is that his face is huge on the album cover, and one of his favorite places to be in the world was in an independent record store, just flipping through the bins — and now his face is going to be plastered all over every single record store in America!”

Photo Credit: Owen Ela