Clementine likes to talk Led Zeppelin.

No surprise there. Clementine (just Clementine) is drummer and founder of the San Francisco-based, all-female Zeppelin tribute Zepparella, which for the last 12 years has built a following on the West Coast and beyond with its muscular re-creations of the seminal hard rock band’s hits. A recent interview she conducted with GO! Magazine quickly devolved into an all-out Zep geek-fest, with Clementine expounding upon the virtues of famous Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, as well as her favorite Zep records, songs and live performances.

“I haven’t fallen out of love with Led Zeppelin; it’s been … 12 years that I’ve been playing these songs, and I still love to listen to Led Zeppelin,” she said. “I still find things in it that are new and kind of more epic, even, now that I know more about the craft of making music. I’m so happy that I chose this band to cover, because it’s just endlessly, there’s so much there. I feel like it would take me really a lifetime to get tired of listening to it and playing it.”

Case in point: After 12 years, the band — Clementine, guitarist Gretchen Menn, bassist Angeline Saris and vocalist Noelle Doughty — is still learning new Zeppelin songs to play. So when the band returns to The Belfry on Thursday, expect a much different set from the one it played at its first appearance at the venue last December.

With each of the band’s members focused on other projects (Clementine sings, writes and plays drums with original band Stars Turn Me On, which will open the Belfry show), finding time to work out new Zeppelin songs can be a challenge.

“Led Zeppelin songs take a bit of time, and we’re not a band that practices regularly,” Clementine said.

“As a musician, I feel like there are — I have kind of a triangle of things that I work on, and one of them is drumming and the Bonham stuff, which is a lifelong education in drumming,” she continued. “He was, I think, the greatest rock drummer, and to be playing his music and playing it with people who are playing the other parts, it’s just been such an unbelievable education in not just drumming but in musicianship and seeing how they structured their songs. So that brings so much to everything else that I do musically.”

Clementine’s love affair with Zeppelin began when she was a teenager, before she ever picked up a drumstick. She remembers hearing the old standby “Stairway to Heaven” on the radio first; soon she was recording songs off the radio.

“I was really into the rock station when I was in high school, and I had sworn off television as the evil of the world at that point, somehow, so I just was stuck on radio,” Clementine said. “They were playing Led Zeppelin A to Z over a long weekend, and I stayed up and recorded it all off of the radio. And that was the Zeppelin that I listened to until, I don’t know, I got older and started buying records.”

She met Menn while the two were playing in the all-female, Bay Area AC/DC tribute band, AC/DShe. The two bonded over a love of Led Zeppelin, and began Zepparella out of a desire to jam — something the rigid AC/DC song forms didn’t allow.

“When we started the band, what we were thinking was, we weren’t as interested in putting on a show so that people would see us and we would be behaving the way that the original people did,” Clementine said. “Gretchen wasn’t gonna be imitating the way that Jimmy (Page, Led Zeppelin guitarist) looked or acted or pointed, doing the hex, all of those kind of signature things that he did. And not trying to dress like them — just starting off being a female band, we just can’t; we’re not gonna look like the dudes. … What we wanted to really emphasize was that we were a band within a structure of somebody else’s music, but that our musical connection with each other was going to be the spotlight the way that Led Zeppelin — that’s what’s great about Led Zeppelin is that each player was a seminal player, and the combination of those made the magic.”

Naturally, Clementine has some opinions about Led Zeppelin. Get ready for the geek-fest.

Favorite album

“Led Zeppelin,” 1969. “I love first records; I feel like you can hear the excitement of the new in it, and it still feels really exciting to me. I always say about the first Aerosmith record — I’ve never listened to another Aerosmith record, because I can’t get past that one. It’s so wonderful, they’re so excited. … That’s how I feel about ‘Zeppelin I.’”

Favorite song

“When the Levee Breaks.” “Oh God, I guess I’m kind of boring because I think that ‘When the Levee Breaks’ is a masterpiece. They didn’t write that song, I understand, but as a person who loves recording, I love that song, I love the vibe of it, the sound of it. I love their take on a traditional blues song.”

Favorite song to play with Zepparella

“Dazed and Confused.” “My very favorite musical moment on drums is in that song, ‘Dazed and Confused,’ when the big solo section ends and it drops back into the verse riff, then it kind of slows down through this long fill.”

Favorite live moment

“My favorite live moment is the beginning of that DVD set ‘How the West Was Won.’ They do ‘Immigrant Song,’ they’re outside and it’s probably just the way it’s shot. It’s kind of a really cool — like the way it’s shot is real kind of cool. It just seems epic. It seems like they’re trying to blow the roof off of this stadium, and it’s really exciting.

“But I think I’ve seen the movie ‘The Song Remains the Same,’ I think I’ve probably seen that movie hundreds of times, even before I was playing Zeppelin. I remember spending a week — one time I was on tour and we had five or six days off, and I remember staying at a friend’s house and I didn’t have anything to do all day and I just watched that movie over and over and over. I just love it so much.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com