John Denver: Annie’s Song

1973 — I was thinking of the age in which this song was written. It was a time before every emotion was ran through an amplifier and turned into a parody. A time more organic, before even compassion itself was manufactured. You couldn’t yet patent lifeforms. That realm still belonged to God, whether you believed in Him or not.

There was more perspective. You weren’t a rube or a bigot just because you stood for something. There was nuance; it seemed to be more understood that not everything was black and white.

It was an age of handwritten love letters, and a heart that beat in anticipation as it unfolded the pages. Pages distilled with the essence of our loved one’s thoughts. Analog. It was a time when we used our imaginations as we thought of our beloved, lacking the instantaneous ‘convenience’ of messaging them. A time of heightened awareness, undulled, wherein we knew even when the other was thinking of us… and we smiled in return.

In such an age, John Denver wrote this song to his wife…

Annie’s Song

You fill up my senses
Like a night in a forest
Like the mountains in springtime
Like a walk in the rain
Like a storm in the desert
Like a sleepy blue ocean
You fill up my senses
Come fill me again

Come let me love you
Let me give my life to you
Let me drown in your laughter
Let me die in your arms
Let me lay down beside you
Let me always be with you
Come let me love you
Come love me again

You fill up my senses
Like a night in a forest
Like the mountains in springtime
Like a walk in the rain
Like a storm in the desert
Like a sleepy blue ocean
You fill up my senses
Come fill me again

3:08


from Wikipedia:

“Annie’s Song” (also known as “Annie’s Song (You Fill Up My Senses)”) is a folk rock and country song recorded and written by singer-songwriter John Denver. The song was released as a single from Denver’s album Back Home Again. It was his second number-one song in the United States, occupying that spot for two weeks in July 1974. “Annie’s Song” also went to number one on the Easy Listening chart. Billboard ranked it as the No. 25 song for 1974.

“Annie’s Song” was written as an ode to Denver’s wife at the time, Annie Martell Denver. Denver “wrote this song in July 1973 in about ten-and-a-half minutes one day on a ski lift” to the top of Ajax Mountain in Aspen, Colorado, as the physical exhilaration of having “just skied down a very difficult run” and the feeling of total immersion in the beauty of the colors and sounds that filled all senses inspired him to think about his wife. Annie Denver recalls the beginnings: “It was written after John and I had gone through a pretty intense time together and things were pretty good for us. He left to go skiing and he got on the Ajax chair on Aspen mountain and the song just came to him. He skied down and came home and wrote it down… Initially it was a love song and it was given to me through him, and yet for him it became a bit like a prayer.”

Annie’s Song – Wikipedia

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *