The song most closely associated with John Denver in 2026 is “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” but the Denver song most quoted in social settings is more likely “Rocky Mountain High.”
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The title of the latter song, a top 10 Billboard Hot 100 entry in 1972, has been associated over the years with smoking weed in Colorado, particularly after the state became the first to legalize its recreational use in 2012. Denver always insisted “Rocky Mountain High” was about inspiration found in the state’s majestic scenery. Most younger Americans who use the phrase likely don’t know Denver originated it. And some who do – particularly Corey Kent – find his story dubious.
“I don’t believe John Denver,” Kent says with a laugh, tongue seemingly in cheek. “He’s totally, ‘I’m smoking weed.’”
Paradoxically, Kent had the very experience Denver espoused during a family trip to Crested Butte, Colo., and it inspired an opposing title, “Rocky Mountain Low.” Kent and his wife, before their final run down the slopes, saw a postcard view as the ski lift reached the mountain’s peak, and it overwhelmed him.
“It was just like this magical moment,” Kent recalls. “Out of nowhere, the song title hit me. We’re at the top of this mountain, we see this rainbow. It was just such a cool moment where this song idea fell into my lap.”
Kent logged it in his phone, and it came in handy during a songwriting engagement on Jan. 15, 2025, in the attic office of Combustion Music songwriter Austin Goodloe (“Seventeen,” “Something’s Gonna Kill Me”). Thomas Archer (“Hurricane,” “This Heart”) and Michael Tyler (“Holy Smokes,” “Somewhere on a Beach”) joined them on a day when the high temperature had plummeted from 50 degrees to 32.
“It’s not like we had to write it when it was sunny and 85 outside,” Archer notes. “I would imagine that had a lot to do with the mood.”
Goodloe had just the thing. He’d developed a pulsing, midtempo groove with a 1950 Kay N-5 Parlor guitar, a starter-level acoustic instrument he found at a yard sale.
“I put a pickup in it, and it just sounded wild,” Goodloe remembers. “I was like, ‘This is a crazy sound that I’ve never heard before.’ I ran it through a tape delay, and I had this kind of bouncing guitar thing going with a simple drum loop behind it, and when they came in, I was like, ‘Guys, I have this wacky, weird vibe.’ I was like, ‘This might be something kind of cool.’”
Kent brought up his “Rocky Mountain Low” title, envisioning it as a song about a guy who’s recently single and, left to his own devices, is returning to his old vices. The first vice is a “stack of vinyls,” and Kent dropped in a mention of Eric Clapton’s Slowhand, the album that launched “Cocaine” and “Lay Down Sally.”
“I don’t care if anybody my age catches the reference or not,” Kent says. “It sounds cool, [and] I know what it means.”
The lyric grew darker as the song reached a pre-chorus – “A good man can only take so much” – and segued into the chorus with a sing-along start, paired with lyrical frustration that the weed ain’t working. As it wound to its conclusion, the chorus dropped from an anthemic feel to a reserved last phrase, the music matching the “Rocky Mountain Low” phrase.
“That was kind of a sweet accident,” Goodloe says. “We wanted a song and a melody that people can sing out loud in a live atmosphere, something very vocal, very vowel-heavy, super easy to sing and something that is congregational. I would assume that the last 30% of the chorus was us just trying to figure out how to get the title in there.”
Verse two increased in anger, with the singer thinking about kicking down his ex’s door. They decided against a bridge and worked through a demo before the day ended, built around Goodloe’s Kay-based foundation. It was during that process that a thumping bass – a la Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” – was added to the pre-chorus, highlighting the guy’s fury.
“When you say, ‘Hey, a guy can only take so much,’ you don’t say that laughing,” Archer offers. “I think Goodloe nailed it with that.”
The studio band played to the Kay-based riff when they laid the instrumental tracks at Nashville’s historic Sound Emporium. “The reason why I picked that studio is because it’s dark,” Goodloe says. “A lot of studios in town can sometimes feel like a dentist’s office, and it’s really bright and fluorescent and white, and I don’t want to feel like I’m about to get my teeth cleaned. I want to create.”
Drummer Aaron Sterling wasn’t sure he could play “Rocky Mountain Low” any better than the demo, reinforcing Kent’s belief that they had a winner. But it also provided some freedom: Since they could fall back on the demo, the musicians could take creative chances with no risk of failing. And they went for it.
Acoustic guitarist Todd Lombardo fit some jiggling sounds around the Kay-based riff, and electric guitarist Kris Donegan piled up a range of dangerous, fiery sounds that compounded the track’s edgy tone. Bassist Preston Shrewbridge was encouraged to play louder and tougher as the song progressed, counter to some of country’s more standard recordings.
“I want that to be a focal point,” Kent says. “I want acoustic and bass to drive, and I want the guitar to sprinkle in like Keith Richards and just be random and almost too loud. I want it to feel like a real band that you saw at a nightclub, not like, ‘Well, there’s another country record that sounds like a different voice with the same band.’”
As the production evolved, Kent asked Koe Wetzel to sing the second verse, and they cut his vocal in Cisco, Texas. The day was harrowing – Wetzel’s pickup broke down, the keys got locked in the cab while it got fixed, and after they finally started working, Kent got an emergency call that his daughter had split her head open in a fall. All worked out in the end, but the frustrations likely helped the performance.
“It really put us in the right mindset to go sing about a terrible day,” Kent says.
Kent thought the label might push back against “Rocky Mountain Low” as a single, since it seemed outside the mainstream to his ears. But his next album is full of heartland rock ‘n’ roll, and he thought it was the perfect introduction. RCA Nashville was on board, as it turned out, and released it to country radio via PlayMPE on Dec. 4. It’s at No. 30 on Billboard’sCountry Airplay chart dated Jan. 31.
“What you hope for as an artist is to carve your own lane, and to me, this embodied that the most,” Kent says. “This is not just the next release from Corey Kent. This is like a new era of Corey. The most obvious choice of song for that statement was ‘Rocky Mountain Low.’”
