McLean was a 14-year-old paper boy on February 4, 1959, when he was sucker-punched by the headline about the plane crash that took the life of Buddy Holly and two other vintage rockers. The day the music died The site of the plane crash that claimed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper, 1959 Today, I offer my view on the words that many of us can and still do sing along to when the song is played. I have researched numerous articles and essays, published long ago and more recently, to assess various interpretations that either confirmed my thinking or put forth something entirely different. His pat answer was always, “It means I don’t have to ever work again if I don’t want to.” (Indeed, he pulls in about $400,000 in annual royalties, and the handwritten lyrics fetched a cool $2 million at auction in 2015.)īut he’s been talking about it more openly these days. It was a mighty bold undertaking to attempt a song that chronicled the rise and fall of rock & roll in an infectious and expansive radio-friendly pop song, and everyone has been relentlessly asking him what the words really mean. McLean had a decent career, with several other popular singles like “Vincent” (a #12 hit) and “Dreidel” (#21) and a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” (#5), but without question it was “American Pie” that defined him… and sustained him… and exasperated him as well. All my songs are about loss – and a certain kind of psychic pain. That’s one big reason why I’m a blue guy, I guess. He had a sister, fifteen years his senior, who was an alcoholic and drug addict “who almost ruined my childhood. One of the motivating factors in McLean’s songwriting through the years has been a family secret that McLean never discussed openly until recently.
‘A long, long time ago’ all the way through to ‘the day the music died.’ I thought, ‘Whoa, what is that?!'” Then one day, I was singing into the tape recorder, and the first verse all came tumbling out, like a genie from the bottle.
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“I wanted to write a big song about America, so I came up with this idea that politics and music influence one another and flow parallel together, forward, but I had no clue how to begin to express that. “It turned out beyond my wildest dreams,” he said in a 2020 article in American Songwriter. “American Pie” is quite possibly the most (over)analyzed song in rock history, which was pretty much what McLean, now 76, had been hoping for. Tell me when that’ll be published so I can skip your blog that week.” Others said they were looking forward to it, recalling the great memories the song evokes for them. When I happened to mention to a few folks that I would be writing a blog post solely about Don McLean’s iconic opus “American Pie” - seeing as how it was released 50 years ago this week - one friend said, “Oh God, please don’t. I’ve recently written a couple blogs that delve into the meaning behind some classic rock song lyrics.