Annie’s Song

By John Denver.

🎵 Sing along with the full lyrics at LyricFind

“Annie’s Song” was written by John Denver for his wife, Annie Martell, and it may hold the record for the most productive chairlift ride in music history. In 1973, after he and Annie had reconciled following a brief but painful separation, Denver went skiing in Aspen. Riding the Ajax chairlift back up Aspen Mountain, still buzzing from a difficult run, he found himself overwhelmed by the beauty around him — the colors, the sounds, the mountain air — and every image led him back to Annie. By the time he reached the top, roughly ten and a half minutes later, the song was finished. He skied down, went home, and wrote it out. That’s why the lyrics read like a nature inventory of love: forests, mountains in springtime, a walk in the rain, a sleepy blue ocean. Annie herself later said that while it began as a love song to her, for John it became something closer to a prayer.

Released in June 1974, it became Denver’s second American #1, holding the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks that July, and it topped the Easy Listening chart as well. Across the Atlantic it did something none of his other songs managed: it went to #1 in the UK, his only major British hit. In a lovely echo, an instrumental version by Irish flutist James Galway became his only major British hit four years later. The marriage that inspired the song sadly ended in divorce in 1982, but the song outlived it beautifully — still a staple at weddings and one of the purest love songs of the 1970s.