Ten Minutes on a Ski Lift
In January 1973, John Denver’s marriage was in trouble. He and Annie Martell had been married since 1967, back when he was still a struggling folk singer playing college gigs. By the early seventies he was one of the biggest names in America — and the two of them had separated.
One morning in Aspen, Colorado, he went skiing. He took a hard run down the mountain, hard enough that it left him shaking when he reached the bottom. Then he got on the lift to ride back up.
Something happened on that chair lift. Years later, in his autobiography Take Me Home, Denver described it plainly: “Suddenly, I’m hypersensitive to how beautiful everything is. All of the pictures merged and I was left with Annie.”
By the time the lift reached the top, the song was finished in his head. It had taken him about ten and a half minutes.
He skied down, went home, and wrote it on paper. That song was “Annie’s Song.”
The Song That Belonged to Everyone
“Annie’s Song” was released in 1974 as the lead single from his eighth album, Back Home Again. On July 27, 1974, it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there two weeks — his second number one, after “Sunshine on My Shoulders.” It also topped the Adult Contemporary chart and went to number one in the United Kingdom, where it remained the only major hit of his career.
Here is a detail most people never notice. Annie’s name does not appear anywhere in the lyrics. Not once. That one choice is probably why the song outlived the marriage it came from — millions of people have played it at their own weddings without ever knowing who Annie was.
Annie herself understood what the song had become. “Initially it was a love song and it was given to me through him,” she said, “and yet for him it became a bit like a prayer.”
What Happened Next
The marriage did not survive. John and Annie adopted two children, Zachary John and Anna Kate, and Denver once said that if people remembered him only as Annie’s husband and those two children’s father, that would be more than enough for him.
But the career kept pulling. Denver said the demands of his success drove them apart. Annie said something closer to the truth from her side — that they had both been too young to handle what happened to him. There were affairs. There was a temper that friends and biographers say turned ugly when it got loose.
They divorced in 1982. During the property settlement, Denver lost control. He took a chainsaw to the bed the two of them had shared and cut it in half, then went after other furniture in the house. In his own autobiography he also admitted to grabbing Annie around the neck in a fit of rage.
He wrote about it himself. That is worth sitting with for a moment: the man who wrote the most tender love song in country music also wrote down the worst thing he ever did to the woman it was written for.
He married again — the Australian actress Cassandra Delaney, in 1988 — and that marriage ended in divorce too. He was still performing “Annie’s Song” in concert for the rest of his life. Asked by an interviewer how it felt to sing it after the divorce, he gave a short answer: “I love the song, and I still love Annie.”
John Denver died on October 12, 1997, when the experimental aircraft he was flying went down off the coast of California. He was 53.
The Song Annie Actually Chose
The day after he died, a reporter asked Annie Denver to name her favorite John Denver song.
She did not say “Annie’s Song.”
She said “Perhaps Love.”
That answer only makes sense if you know when “Perhaps Love” was written. Denver wrote it around 1981, and he wrote it for Annie — but not during the good years. He wrote it while they were separated and the divorce was already coming. He recorded it as a duet with the opera tenor Plácido Domingo, and it became the title track of an album released that December. It charted in 1982, the same year the marriage legally ended.
“Annie’s Song” is a man overwhelmed by what he has. “Perhaps Love” is a man trying to describe love after he has watched it fail — as shelter, as something you can come back to when there is nothing left of the rest.
She added that she liked “Annie’s Song” too. But when she was asked, on the worst day, to pick one, she picked the one he wrote while losing her.
That is the part the ten-minute ski lift story always leaves out. The famous song came easy, in the time it takes to ride up a mountain. The one that mattered to her came hard, nine years later, when they already knew how it was going to end.