A ski lift is the last place where you expect a hit song to be written. But that’s the extraordinary place where John Denver wrote the beautiful ballad “Annie’s Song”. The song appears on John Denver’s eighth studio album “Back Home Again” and was released as a single in 1974. In this article, we’ll explore the story and meaning behind the song!
Aspen Mountain’s Chair Lift
Like a true country boy, John Denver considered himself a man of the outdoors. It was in nature where he felt at home. And correspondingly, it was in nature where John Denver found inspiration for his music.
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When Denver reached success as a solo musician with songs such as “Country Roads” and “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”, he decided to buy his dream house in Aspen, Colorado. Right up Denver’s alley, for Aspen is known as a ski resort town with lots of outdoor recreation. It is there in Aspen where Denver wrote his famous “Annie’s song”. A song he wrote for his first wife Annie Martell after they fell into an argument.
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In a BBC documentary about John Denver, Annie Martell said: “John and I were in our kitchen, and we had had an argument. We had an argument and then we sorted it out. And he left to go skiing. I was putzing around and about half an hour/45 minutes later he came back in the door. He’d gone to Aspen Mountain, gotten on the Bell Mountain chair lift, and he wrote the song in ten minutes. He came back and played it for me.”
In his autobiography “Take Me Home”, John Denver wrote about that infamous lift ride: “Suddenly I was hypersensitive to how beautiful everything was. All of these things filled up my senses. When I said this to myself unbidden images came one after the other. The night in the forest, a walk in the rain, the mountains in springtime. All of the pictures merged and then what I was left with was Annie. That song was the embodiment of the love that I felt at the time. In the ten minutes it took to reach the top of the mountain, the song was there.”
It perfectly showcases John Denver’s unique way of songwriting. He didn’t write songs with intent in a comfortable recording studio. No, Denver wrote based on inspiration he drew out of nature. And if that inspiration dawned upon him in a ski lift, the song was written there. As is the unique case with “Annie’s song”.
Rocky Divorce
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Although “Annie’s Song” is one of the most beautiful love songs ever written, it couldn’t save John Denver’s marriage with Annie Martell. In 1982 John and Annie divorced, with Martell citing them as too immature to deal with Denver’s success. The divorce ended in a rather controversial way. During the property settlement of the divorce John Denver got so enraged that he decided to cut the marital bed in half with a chainsaw.
Despite the rocky divorce, John Denver continued to love Annie and “Annie’s Song”. In an interview with Nöjesmaskinen, where he got asked how he felt about performing the song after the divorce, he said: “I love the song, and I still love Annie. We are just not happy together, we don’t want to live together. But the song is a beautiful love song. And as much as it was written for her, it’s a song for our children, it’s a song for the way I feel for my audience, it’s a song for the way a feel about life, it’s a prayer. It can be sung in many ways and I will always sing that song.
The Legacy of Annie’s Song
The beautiful song, with its unique back story, is considered one of John Denver’s greatest songs. “Annie’s Song” topped the US charts in July 1974. The song also topped the charts in the UK, Canada, and Ireland. It is considered one of the greatest love songs of all time and gets regularly played at weddings.
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