Vinyl LP pressing including digital download. John Denver s Greatest Hits was released in late 1973 for the holiday shopping season. The collection included material from his earlier days as a songwriter (going back to 1965 on For Bobbie ) to his later hit Rocky Mountain High . Greatest Hits is important historically because it contained new revisionist recordings of several songs. Notable new versions included Leaving on a Jet Plane Starwood in Aspen Follow Me Rhymes and Reasons The Eagle and the Hawk Sunshine On My Shoulders and Poems Prayers and Promises . Denver explained this himself in the liner notes by saying that he had picked the numbers most requested in his concerts but that I felt that some of these songs had grown a bit that I am singing better than I was four or five years ago and that I would like to treat some of the songs a little differently than I had in the original recordings.