Search - Lee Holdridge :: Take Me Home: The John Denver Story (2000 TV Movie)

Is it ironic that the Take Me Home soundtrack to the made-for-TV movie about everyone's (except for Charlie Rich, that is) favorite Muppet-haired country singer comes out at the same time as a John Denver indie-rock tribute of the same name? Perhaps a John Denver renaissance is at hand. Don't laugh. As both albums attest, Denver was an amazingly talented singer and composer, his songs central to the Zeitgeist of an age. The auspices for the Take Me Home soundtrack are dubious (a CBS movie starring Chad Lowe as the late troubadour), but, incredibly, it stands as one of the more definitive retrospectives of the artist's career. Late in his life, no longer enjoying the heights of the charts, Denver revisited many of his early works, reinterpreting them with his matured vision and voice. These recastings are sprinkled liberally throughout the album, side by side with his original recordings, and the result is both the John Denver you loved and a John Denver you've never heard before. His rerecordings of early hits ("Leaving, on a Jet Plane," "Take Me Home, Country Roads," "Sunshine on My Shoulders") discover new emotive depths to the tunes, his voice richer in timbre and expression. Untouched originals ("Annie's Song," "This Old Guitar," "Poems, Prayers, and Promises," "Thank God I'm a Country Boy") remind us of a more optimistic day, when his songs ruled the airwaves and became ingrained in our consciousness. --Tod Nelson