[imagesource: Amazon]
You can hear it in your head already, can’t you?
A long long time ago, I can still remember how, That music used to make me smile…
In 1971, Don McLean cemented his place in musical history with American Pie, although he actually wrote it two years earlier at the age of just 24.
Most agree that the song, which comes in at just a touch over eight and a half minutes, is about “the cultural and political decline of the US in the 1960s”, but there’s a more personal element that is often overlooked.
Let’s plonk the song here, to get you in the mood, before we take a closer look at the Guardian’s interview with the rather secretive musician:
Leave that playing in the background.
Don lost his father at the age of 15, after having a premonition days earlier that his father would die, and said he cried for a solid two years.
This fact has often been overlooked when trying to analyse what the song’s lyrics mean:
Every line of American Pie has been stripped bare. There are fan websites dedicated entirely to decoding it. Who was the jester who sang for the king and queen in a coat he borrowed from James Dean? What exactly was revealed the day the music died? The Vietnam war, social revolution, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, JFK, Mick Jagger, Martin Luther King, Charles Manson, Hells Angels, The Beatles, hallucinogenic drugs, God, the Devil – they’re all in there, aren’t they? No one can be totally sure, except one man.
As the 50-year anniversary of the song draws near, a new documentary is set for release, a Broadway show is planned for 2022, and there will even be a children’s book.
Don knows that the lyrics being shrouded in mystery is to his advantage, so he’s not giving too much away:
“Carly Simon’s still being coy about who You’re So Vain was written about,” he says. “So who cares, who gives a fuck?”
…there’s no point asking McLean direct questions about what the song means: he’s too well practised at flicking them off. “It means I’ll never have to work again,” he used to quip.
That’s my favourite quote of the entire interview.
The closest he comes to letting us behind the curtain is this exchange:
The opening of American Pie is largely accepted as mourning Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash in 1959. Holly was McLean’s musical idol as a kid, but could that verse equally be about his father?
“You’ve hit the nail on the head,” he says. “I mean, that’s exactly right. That’s why I don’t like talking about the lyrics because I wanted to capture and say something that was almost unspeakable. It’s indescribable.” He adds: “American Pie is a biographical song.”
The cultural allusions are, he continues, his own in-jokes, poking fun at some of the big acts of the day. “Just the idea of choosing names that people could identify with: different artists, what they were doing, what they’d done. I was making fun of it all.”
Perhaps not as insightful as those who have spent years poring over every line of the song had hoped, but still more details than he’s given over the past 49 or so years.
Just remember that he’ll never have to work again, and he knows it.
Read the full interview here.
[source:guardian]
