I don’t dislike John Denver, to be clear. I feel like this is an important point to clarify because I know that people adore him and because I know that the C reads to most people as quite a harsh ranking. I have some specific complaints that I stand by, that I feel are sufficient to warrant the overall opinion I have developed by this point. Nevertheless, I don’t dislike John Denver. I like his voice. I think he’s a good songwriter and I like many of his songs.
In fact, one of my main complaints is less to do with him and more to do with the nature of the genre, of what it means to record and publish music in the 70s and 80s in the folk/country industry. The standard practice is to do a lot of covers, and John Denver follows that practice. Most of his records are about 50% original work and 50% covers of folk standards. Which is, like, I get it. That’s what you do. I still don’t like it, and it bugs me enough to diminish my overall experience of him as an artist.
It’s just, it’s such a pain, y’know? Particularly when I actually do think he’s a good songwriter—I think he tends to do his original music so much better than he does his covers. Like, I do have such a distaste for covers. In addition, I like his songs better than the covers, so the covers are doubly not doing anything for me. They feel like such a waste of time. I think John Denver sounds better singing his own songs. He’s a good songwriter; I wish he did more of that.
So, complaint one: way too many covers, the ratio is obnoxious.
Complaint two: it goes on forevvvvvver. Meaning there is just too much of it. This is also arguably not a fault with John Denver himself, and is instead a fault of my own method of listening. An album a day, every day without breaks, does not lend itself well to being receptive to a large catalogue of music from the same guy. To some degree, I think this is unavoidable. Such a quantity of content is always going to take time to digest, time that I just am not going to give on a first listen. And so, I am inevitably going to feel it all blend together, to feel it become indistinct mush.
In other words, I got bored of it. By my count, I listened to 27 albums across the span of three weeks, and by the time I was a week in I was already feeling like I was ready for it to be over. I was mentally done, and there was still so much to go. For artists with big discographies like this, at some point my brain just loses interest and stops listening. I’m not listening to listen, I’m listening to get through it. At such quantity, the music stops being music and becomes sound. The artist kinda loses their face, becomes an object instead of an artist by virtue of quantity. It’s tough.
Complaint three: even at its best and my most interested, I just don’t like it that much. There were three albums I think I liked well enough that I would call them “good albums”: Rocky Mountain High, Back Home Again, and Windsong. There were a few other albums that I liked pretty well, and then the other 20 or so albums were all just… fine. Fairly pleasant to listen to, but not containing much that caught my attention or stood out to me. Just a lot of stuff that was somewhere between “pretty alright” and “fine”.
Taken altogether, I think I’m pretty satisfied with the C. I recognize that there is lots of good stuff in here, but there’s also just a lot of stuff. And again, even the good stuff is still not totally my jam. Like, it’s pretty alright, it’s good, but it’s not my favorite. There’s good stuff, and there’s stuff that feels to me like glaring problems. That tracks with a C
John Denver complete, now listening to: Polyphia
tunafruitsandwitch 