Album Reviews
At this point, John Denver albums are as numerous as potted plants in the apartments of these urbanites, and both are symptoms of the same longing. The singer acknowledges his average listener in "Fly Away":
Life in the city can make you crazy
For sounds of the sand and the sea
Life in a high-rise can make you hungry
For things that you can't even see.
In reality, wilderness is dramatic and ferocious, but Windsong has us thinking of it as a rather breathtaking suburb. It is a measure of Windsong's effectiveness as fantasy that it is above all tranquilizing.
Like some ancient Greek philosopher, Denver endlessly contemplates the elements - earth, air, water not fire, however. He even has a penchant for Greek mythology. (One song is entitled "Calypso," and "Spirit" pays its respects to Hercules, Apollo, Orpheus. Andromeda and Vega.) Besides the vacant nature hymns, Windsong contains songs which cast him as the great quester, and a couple in which he's more the typical earthbound C&W protagonist. Every number echoes as if it were recorded in some vast Gemeinschaft in the Rockies. The title song is unbounded echo and little more, giving his irritating, diaphragmatic but pallid vibrato special prominence. "Cowboy's Delight," which has a pretty melody and a thoughtful, swelling arrangement, is the sweetest of the bunch, but still only a better version of what he does elsewhere. It seems we readers of "Doonesbury" can expect John Denver to remain Duke's bete noire for some time to conie, and that of anyone else who has no great weakness for pipe dreams.
(Posted: Dec 4, 1975)
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