THE STORIES BEHIND THE SONGS
Don McLean
American Pie
Half a century on, the folk-rock anthem about the souring of the American Dream continues to confound and inspire.
Words: Bill DeMain
PIE WAGON
“The song has become its own world,” said Don McLean. Indeed, it provides the deepest of YouTube rabbit holes. Beyond highprofile covers by Madonna, Jon Bon Jovi, John Mayer and Weird Al Yankovic (parodied as a retelling of the plot of Star Wars), there are hundreds of homegrown versions, as well as line-by-line dissections of the song’s possible cultural meanings.
On February 3 this year, the anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death, the circle was completed when McLean entered his own rabbit hole, with a new a-cappella collaboration on AmericanPiewith vocal group Home Free.
A long, long time ago – 50 years ago, actually – Don McLean was a little-known singer-songwriter with a lot on his mind. The then 25-year-old was living in New York, writing songs for the follow-up to his debut album Tapestry, and felt he needed “a big song to tie it all together”.
“I was conscious of the fact that I was trying to create a rock’n’roll dream sequence,” McLean told me in 1997, of his concept for American Pie. “But it was way more than rock’n’roll. It was about an America that was coming apart at the seams. I was trying to create this American song, but not like This Land Is Your Land or America The Beautiful. I wanted to connect with the parts of America that mattered to me, starting with Buddy Holly. Buddy didn’t matter to anybody when I wrote this song, I have to tell you.”