PONIES THE STANDOUT TRACK ON JOHN DENVER'S DIFFRENT DIRECTIONS

By the time american country folk legend JOHN DENVER recorded the 1991 album DIFFRENT DIRECTIONS, his charttopping glory days of the 70`s were just a memory and he was plodding along with little commercial success on his own record label WINDSTAR, following a falling out with RCA after he recorded the 1986 album DREAMLAND EXPRESS. The first album he recorded on his own label HIGHER GROUND was a commercial flop, unaided by any major label promotion the only song that broke the top 200 was the lyrically ambiguous but breathtaking THE FLOWER THAT SHATTERED THE STONE. This album also produced FOR YOU, a powerful piano ballad written for his second wife CASSANDRA DELANEY, as well as a tongue in cheek and bluesey stomp called HOME GROWN TOMATOES. Following HIGHER GROUND, Denver went into orchestra accompanyment mode and went about recording the album EARTH SONGS which was released in 1990. Most of the songs on it were re-recordings of some of his classic hits from his 70`s heyday, ROCKY MOUNTAIN SUITE (COLD NIGHTS IN CANADA), CALYPSO, SUNSHINE ON MY SHOULDERS, WIND SONG and EAGLE AND THE HAWK never sounded better than what they do on this album. I regard EARTH SONGS as being the best 'progressive contemporary' album ever recorded, the combination of the orchestral backing, along with Denver's maturing and increasingly powerful singing, makes some of the original versions sound dated where on here they sound positively timeless. Denver needed more people who thought like me though, because it faired even worse commercially than its predeccessor HIGHER GROUND. No doubt DIFFRENT DIRECTIONS suffered a bit from Denver's growing apathy with the music business after having recorded two of the best albums of his career which amazingly were major commercial flops. By this stage his marriage to Delaney was already on the rocks and the lack of cohesion evident on DIFFRENT DIRECTIONS represented the turmoil going on in his personal life around that time. CHAINED TO THE WHEEL, a cover of the BLACK SORROWS tune, seemed an odd choice for an american folk singer to record, but it's definitely one of the more upbeat songs on here. But the best one is a blast from the past, the orchestral backed PONIES, which sounds so similiar to another Denver-melodrama called RIVER, which was released around 1980. DIFFRENT DIRECTIONS done worse again than the first two WINDSTAR albums for Denver, his fans might have still liked him but in many instances they obviously weren't buying his new albums on the WINDSTAR label.