“Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver

"Rocky Mountain High" is John Denver's love letter to Colorado, first recorded in 1972 as the title track of his album of the same name and gathered up again on Earth Songs in 1990. He wrote it with Mike Taylor, drawing on his move to Aspen three years earlier, and he used to tell concert crowds that finishing it had cost him nine months, far longer than usual. Milt Okun produced.

For all its wide-open wonder, the song has a sting in its tail: a later verse takes aim at tourism chewing up the mountains' beauty. It briefly got caught in controversy too, when a legal ruling let the FCC censor songs judged to promote drug use. Colorado got the last word, making it one of the state's two official songs.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.