Don McLean: ‘I’m more of an inventor than a songwriter’

The sprawling eight-and-a-half minute long ballad, lamenting “the day the music died”, would go on to have a major impact on popular culture, not just in the US but around the world – something that its composer will be celebrating when he tours the UK later this year.

“I don’t understand any of this,” says McLean, now 76, reflecting on his songwriting art. “Honest to God, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I do things from feel and instinct, I’m more of an inventor, really, than a songwriter. I have these ideas, concepts, and they’re all different and I have to paint different melodies, different lyric structures.”

Numerous attempts have been made over the years to decode American Pie’s enigmatic lyrics, which allude to the death of the 60s dream, yet McLean has always resisted close analysis of their meaning. Today, he says he can understand why they continue to fascinate people, but explains: “It’s meant to be an impressionistic song like a Monet or some kind of a painting like that, or something that is not meant to be pedantic or didactic.”

Nevertheless, he has opened up a little more for a forthcoming documentary film, The Day The Music Died, due out this year. “We had a lot of fun with it,” he says. “I actually sat down on a very hot day in May. We don’t have air conditioning so I was sweating bullets and I’m in the living room and I said, ‘Do you know what, I’m going to go over every word of this song and I’m going to give you the notion of what was on my mind when I did it.’”

Filmmaker Mike Moormann tracked down footage of McLean singing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969. “I also told him that there was a song we used to do on the sloop called Bye Bye My Roseanna – I think that’s where that ‘bye bye’ idea might have come into my head,” says McLean.

Don McLean was 24 years old when he wrote American Pie. His early life had been marked by tragedy, losing his father when he was 15. His elder sister Betty Anne also struggled with addiction to drink and drugs. He points out Betty Anne’s story ended happily, with her taking a Master’s degree and becoming a respected therapist after becoming sober. “But that was later on,” he says. “At the beginning the effect on me was I could not connect with people after my father passed away. I didn’t want to get hurt like that again.

“I still have a problem with that,” he says, “I’m always waiting for things to end. It scarred me in certain ways, to some degree in my familiarity with loss, and that shows up in a lot of songs. But there are songs that I write that are happy. I’m pretty well-balanced, I guess.”

While the song has remained a radio staple, it has also been used in such blockbuster films as Black Widow, starring Scarlett Johansson, and Finch, featuring Tom Hanks. Cover versions have also helped to introduce it to new audiences – the most recent was by the American a capella group Home Free.

“They did the whole song from beginning to end and we had a number one video in country music for eight weeks and it was weird,” McLean says.

He is diplomatic about Madonna’s abridged interpretation for her film The Next Best Thing, which was a number one in several countries including the UK in 2000. “Her friend Rupert Everett was really keen on the song and I think influenced her to do it – that’s what I heard. I never spoke a word to Madonna so I can’t tell you (for sure),” he says.

“She had a rough time getting it off the ground, then she did it and they put (the song) in the movie several different ways, then the next thing I hear is she’s going to make a single out of it. Well, you could have scraped me off the ceiling. This has got to be the biggest act in music since Elvis Presley, and she does her own stuff or has things written for her, she knows what she’s doing.”

Amid a flurry of activity, a children’s book has been based on the song; next will come a Broadway show incorporating not only American Pie but many others from McLean’s back catalogue.

The singer sounds pretty satisfied with his lot when he says: “It has to do with this mind of mine and how I had, and still have to some degree, the ability to create reality with my work, and change things, change people, and I’ve been doing it for 50 years.”

When it comes to modern music, however, he laments that much of it does not mean anything, believing it’s a reflection of the way that social values have changed. “I don’t really know what anybody’s values are any more,” he says. “I know that people are very anti-intellectual, they don’t want open discussions about things. Discussions are closed, college campuses are closed, everyone is easily offended. You can’t learn anything if you’re easily offended.

“We’re building a pressure cooker situation here with political correctness and all this stuff that’s going on with people trying to control everything.”

He adds: “But it’s not for me to judge. I had my day, I made my contribution, I will continue to work indefinitely. But everybody has a right to their own form of expression; if it makes people happy, I’m for it.”

One contemporary artist he does have time for is Ed Sheeran. The pair, it seems, share a mutual admiration and have met, crooning McLean’s song Vincent at a Teen Cancer America concert in 2018.

“Ed Sheeran is the main man,” McLean says of the Yorkshire-born star. “He’s grown in the last four or five years into the focus, really, of singing and songwriting and he’s a soloist, like I was for about 20 years. One of the wonderful things about YouTube, from my point of view, is you can go back and see me from 1968 until now and so a lot of young people studied me, what I did, how I did it, because the stuff is there to see. A lot of people that I love you can’t find any footage of them at all.

“But if I were young I would study Ed Sheeran. I would really learn what it is he does, how he does it, because he’s the only one that has a defined presence of some sort that you could study. A lot of the groups out there are just really a spectacle... it’s not really very interesting musically.”

Don McLean plays at York Barbican on September 28, 2022 and Sheffield City Hall on October 1. His new album, American Boys, will be released in 2022, along with the film The Day The Music Died. donmclean.com