1981 · Behind the Songs
A duet with Plácido Domingo that radio almost refused to play.
The strangest record of John Denver’s career began as a letter to his wife. Written while he and Annie Martell were separated and moving toward divorce, “Perhaps Love” became, by Annie’s own later account, her favorite of all his songs — more than “Annie’s Song” itself. Producer Milt Okun heard something larger in it and proposed an unlikely partner: Plácido Domingo, the opera tenor. Denver’s gentle folk tenor against Domingo’s operatic power, with Lee Holdridge conducting, turned a private apology into a small summit meeting between two musical worlds. It was the only track on Domingo’s 1981 album Perhaps Love to feature Denver’s voice alongside his; Denver also backed Domingo on guitar on the album’s version of “Annie’s Song.”
Almost nobody in radio wanted it. One independent promoter told Okun flatly that it was beautiful and had no chance of airplay — and then a top-five station in Philadelphia began playing it every hour, on the hour. The station owner’s wife, Okun later learned, was in love with the tenor. CBS Masterworks, which had not planned to release any single from the album, rushed “Perhaps Love” out (with “Annie’s Song” on the B-side), and it reached number 22 on the Adult Contemporary chart and number 59 on the Hot 100 in 1982. Holdridge would later credit the pairing with helping to open the door for the whole “popera” wave — the Three Tenors, Josh Groban, Andrea Bocelli. Denver cut a solo version for his 1982 album Seasons of the Heart, but the duet remains the definitive one: two voices from different continents of music, meeting on common ground.