Annie’s Song

“Annie’s Song” (also known as “Annie’s Song (You Fill Up My Senses)”) is a folk rock and country song written and recorded 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” 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.”   “The first time I heard ‘Annie’s Song,’ I told John it had the same melody as Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, Second Movement,” says Milt Okun. “He walked over to the piano, sat for an hour and came back, and the only thing remaining from Tchaikovsky was the first five notes. It was fantastic