More John Denver

I wrote HERE about the hold John Denver has on me, partly from nostalgia. And this person at Aquarium Drunkard feels the same need to defend him:

It’s easy to dismiss John Denver as a guilty pleasure. If a hot young girl walks by with a vintage John Denver shirt she is most likely being ironic. People will generally give you disapproving looks or smile and wait for you to admit you are only joking. Take comfort in his uncool. It’s actually refreshing to not give a shit once in while. He is an artist that you will have to defend.

John Denver has of course become some sort of milquetoast punchline that nobody cool is supposed to like. But he's written some amazing songs, songs that have become so universal that half of the people hearing them probably have no idea he wrote them.

Leaving on a Jet Plane: Good folk songs seem unwritten, to this day I can’t believe Bob Dylan wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind”, it seems impossible. It should be mysterious like Aesop fables, was he one man or many? How the hell did Jerry Jeff Walker write “Mr. Bojangles”? I guess it’s hard to believe because it seems like no one in modern music is capable of writing these songs anymore. Who is going to sing “Poker Face” to their children twenty years from now?