¶ Intro / Opening
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¶ Podcast Introduction and Career Overview
Hello and welcome to Soda Jacker on Songwriting. This is Brian, here with Simon, and we hope you're all in good health. Joining us today is a renowned American singer and songwriter whom the Beach Boys Brian Wilson once described as having a voice that could cut through steel.
His songs have been recorded or performed by the diverse likes of Elvis Presley, Shirley Bassie, Glen Campbell, Fred Astair, Madonna, George Michael, Drake, Ed Sheeran, and Josh Groben, to name a few.
In autumn of twenty twenty, he re-released twelve of his classic albums, that's 173 songs, onto streaming services in a partnership with Time Life, the first time those recordings have been made available in a digital format. to which he added a new covers album still playing favourites last October. We're honoured to welcome the great Don McLean to the show.
Don was born in New Rochelle, New York in nineteen forty five. By the age of five he'd already developed a keen interest in a diverse range of music and spent many hours listening to the radio and his dad's record collection. He credits the Weavers nineteen fifty five Live at Carnegie Hall album as his gateway into folk.
A sickly child he suffered with severe asthma, which would keep him off school for long periods. Nevertheless, he began taking opera lessons around the age of twelve, which strengthened his lungs and helped alleviate his condition.
He bought his first guitar as a teenager and by 16 was already writing and performing and making contacts in the music business. He did his first recording sessions with Eric Darling and was invited to join the folk trio The Rooftop Singers, but saw himself very much as a solo artist. In nineteen sixty three he briefly attended Villanova University where he met Jim Crochek.
And after dropping out, spent several years performing at venues like The Bitter End in New York and The Troubadour in LA, as well as the Newport Folk Festival, appearing alongside the likes of Janice Ian, his mentor Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Steppenwolf.
Don eventually landed a record deal and recorded his debut album Tapestry in nineteen sixty nine. The record made little commercial impact, but the label was then taken over by United Artists, which would prove a pivotal moment in our guest's career.
Don't sprawling epic American Pie reached number one in nineteen seventy one, and he was thrust to stardom. American Pie has since been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and preserved in the Library of Congress, and hit number one again at the turn of the millennium when it was covered by Madonna.
The achingly gorgeous Vincent followed a few months later, which made the US top ten and was UK number one. The American Pie album, released in nineteen seventy-one, also hit the UK top spot and remained in the charts for over a year. Don became one of the most in-demand concert performers of the seventies, his time spent honing his craft around the folk clubs in the late sixties rarely paying off during this period.
He also inspired um Killing Me Softly with his song, didn't he? Mm-hmm. Which of course was a hit in nineteen seventy two for Roberta Flack and later for the Fujies as well.
Thank you, Paul Gambacini.
Yeah. Other fine albums from this period include nineteen seventy two's Don McLean, nineteen seventy four's Hugely Underrated Homeless Brother, and nineteen seventy seven's Primetime. Don scored another UK number one in nineteen eighty with a splendid cover of Roy Orbison's Crying, and he's continued to produce fine work over the ensuing decades. His most recent set of original material was his twenty eighteen offering botanical gardens.
He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004 and received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Radio 2 Folk Awards in twenty twelve.
You can hear a playlist of songs from across Don's career if you head to his page at sodajeker.com slash podcast where you'll find a link under the episode player. Keep up to date with all his latest news at DonhyphonMe dot com, Facebook dot com slash Don McLean, at Don McLean on Twitter, and at the Don McLean on Instagram.
Find us skulking around at Sodajerka.com, Facebook.com slash Soda Jerker and at Soda Jerker on Twitter and Instagram. If you're new to the show, follow, rate and review wherever you get your pods, and if you so wish you can contribute to the upkeep of the show at Sodajica.com/slash donate.
Before we move on, many thanks to Jolan for her help setting up the interview.
¶ Digital Re-releases and Songwriting Philosophy
Okay, here we are with the preeminent Don McLean.
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Thanks for being with us, Don, it's a pleasure.
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
And congrats on having so much of your material released on digital platforms this month. 173 tracks, I think it was.
Oh, this is um big deal for me because um you know, this is the new uh record store. It's the record store in the sky now. It used to be Virgin, it used to be Tower Wreckers, it used to be whatever, and that's all gone and now There's this record store in the sky. So um Time Life is really doing a great job on this. And uh in fact they I think organized this uh podcast with you, so they're really promoting it.
drawing millions and millions of listeners and people downloading tracks that they've never heard before, and that makes me very happy.
Oh that's great.
There's so much stuff in there, isn't there? You know, there's I think as I said, a hundred and seventy three tracks. Do you consider yourself a a prolific songwriter?
No, no, I don't. You know, a lot of people who you never heard of will say, I wrote a thousand songs, yeah, that nobody ever heard, you know. I mean
Yeah.
So y I don't do that. I uh if I have a project Or if I have a really interesting idea that keeps haunting me. I'll write a song, but uh honestly to tell you the truth, I don't know how I got where I got. I have no idea why I'm talking about all this material. There is so much stuff. out there on me. I mean there are hundreds and hundreds of videos, there are hundreds of bits and pieces from television appearances and concerts and concert videos and I've made thousands of appearances.
I think it's partly because of that. I've always kept busy. You know, I never stayed off the road for fifty years, so I was always making T V appearances and doing interviews and um and then songs were occurring to me and boom, you know, I'd make a live album somewhere or I'd go in the studio and start an album. And so all of a sudden there's if you add everything up, there's probably, I don't know, thirty-five albums if you add the studio stuff, the live stuff, the compilations and whatnot.
And when an idea does start to come through, is it kind of a process of following your instincts and maybe refining it later as you go?
Well, you know, I really have to have a passion for it. And as I get older, that passion is less and less. because I've done so much, Who Needs Another Don McClain album? I say that to myself. I mean, you know, there are plenty of them out there, you know. And also the I have to have a receptive uh company that would want to put it out. But uh You know, there's very little that excites me about
what I hear around. It seems that Hollywood is stuck in doing sequels and prequels and comic books and all kinds of stuff and musicians are making if you call them that, are making pretty much kind of a um a rhythm track with a couple of Stupid lyrics and a little chorus they say over and over again until you're brain dead hearing it. Just nothing out there that turns me on, you know, that I think, wow, I wanna put something out there with that or that excites me.
¶ Capturing Ideas and Personal Stories
And when the muse does kind of strike, um, do you have a particular way you like to capture ideas? Are you scribbling stuff down in notepads? Are you using your your phone to document ideas?
Well, I used to sing straight into a tape recorder, one of those little tape recorders with a micro cassette. They got smaller and smaller through the decades, but I was always had a tape recorder. And I just turn it on and I would sometimes start singing the song, you know, melody and and lyrics.
And then I would stop and then listen to it and then go on and sing some more. That's pretty much the way I've done most everything. I've I don't do melodies and then put lyrics to them. One time I put a melody to a Shakespeare poem called uh Well, the song I use was Lovers Love the Spring and it's from a poem by Shakespeare. And I created a song out of that.
And have there been times, Don, where you haven't written for a while?
Oh yeah.
Some guests talk about taking quite substantial breaks from songwriting.
Most of the time. Are you kidding me? I mean, I only write once in a while. I'm I'm much more interested in what hobbies I might have or things I'm doing. Um I don't take any of this very seriously, believe it or not. And uh here I've become known all over the world for these songs I've written and uh I'm not a serious guy in that way, you know.
If I have a record deal and if I have a g like the with botanical gardens, BMG wanted to put it out and uh I was excited, but I wrote the album first but I had a couple of songs and I sent them down to Nashville and my record producer Mike Seavers and his brother are they like ace guitar players and they put together a track on a song called The Lucky Guy.
And I said, Wow, I like that, you know? And uh so that got me turned on. And so I started to write and then we had sessions with the band in the studio and cut about five or six more songs, and that was the record. and I've dredged up a whole lot of stuff in that album, even to the point where I wrote a song called The Total Eclipse of the Sun. And it was very interesting because I remember what happened was I I had this girl in high school that I really loved.
And I was poor. I had a little lived with my mother in a little flat, you know, and she had was well off and had this big house out on Long Island and she invited me out there for the weekend And the first minute I got there, she broke up with me. And I couldn't get home. So I had to be around her avoiding me and her family and everything. And in the middle of that whole thing there was this eclipse of the sun. So I wrote this song, I'm pretty proud of it because I said I was eclipsed, you know.
And uh, yeah.
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¶ Songs of Social Commentary
Well it's been great revisiting some of the older albums as well. Um things like uh Headroom and Primetime. Yeah. You were highlighting a lot of important issues on those records, weren't ya? Like um the media and homelessness and government corruption and all those sorts of things.
Yeah, well that wasn't those are poetic issues to write about. Those are Woody Guthrie issues. Pandemics are not. Uh Donald Trump is not. You know, you can't write about this kind of environment that we have which is so uncivilized and so trashy. You know, I have to have a noble reason. There's one song that's on the Headroom album, which is called Lady in Waiting.
It's a song nobody ever noticed, but it's the song about a lady who was a bridesmaid to Jackie Kennedy when she married John F. Kennedy, and she became homeless. And so it's her story in a way. She uh started up at the tippity top of society, you know, there uh in um Palm Beach and ended up in the garbage.
And uh this can happen, you know, i th the the moral of it is that nobody's immune from falling through the cracks and becoming poor. And we have so many people now who've lost their jobs, who are doing well. Some of them may become homeless. Yeah.
I'd say prime time's probably more relevant now than ever.
That was exciting because what I would do is I would have visions of things and Pete Seeger loved this song. He said this is a great achievement. He wrote me a little note about it and I was so pleased he liked it'cause I didn't care about who likes what. You know, I just do what I do. But um the idea was two things. I started seeing music becoming mechanical and it was before Devo and um
G. E. Smith and the whole mechanical man type of uh music, which I love Devo, by the way. I love all those songs. There was that and then I wanted to make it into this mad game show. you know, America is a game show. Spin the wheel. Who knows where you'll go? You go to Cuba, you may go to Canada, you know, spin it you may go to Canada twice, you know. Had all this fun with the song, you know, and then meanwhile
on the television, all of this tough stuff is happening. You know, old lady gets rolled, a guy gets shot, somebody says, Pass the chicken, you know, there's bombers in the ocean and And then there's chemicals and everything and that's basically I sing that now. I I didn't sing it for like thirty years. Now I sing it all.
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¶ Wonderful Baby and Fred Astaire
Another um favourite album of ours is Homeless Brother. It has some great stuff on it. Um two of our particular favourites are A Wonderful Baby and um Legend of Andrew McCrew.
Yeah, thank you.
Wonderful baby, that melody's just kind of irresistible. It has that kind of Mr. Sandman kind of sound too.
Right.
Yeah, strange kind of timelessness to it.
When you play that on the guitar you go from a B flat to an A. So it feels pretty good. And then G seven da da da da C da da da Da da da F sharp da da da da da da da da da da F sharp F da da and then back. So it's kind of a nice little progression and a lot of bar chords but on the album uh rearview mirror, I do that solo and I was on my game in those days as a guitar player and you can hear it's very clean
and it rings out. My guitars always have a lot of uh a ring to them. I like to have them envelop my voice and uh That came just like that. If you hear the version on Rearview Mirror, and then Joel Dorn, who was probably one of the greatest uh record producers that ever lived. did all the other stuff. The voices. I did some background voices with some girls and we added things and a little marching band at the end and all kinds of cute little stuff. He was
Magic that guy. He's he's dead now, I miss him.
Didn't Fred Astaire cover that song, is that right?
Yeah, Fred Astero. What happened was that Fred hadn't been in the studio probably for ten, fifteen years, maybe. He and Crosby, you know, were elegantly retired, you know, I don't know what they did, but they were just had all the money in the world and they would make these casual T V appearances once in a while and go back to doing pretty much what they wanted to do. Nothing hard, nothing strenuous.
And for some reason the two of them decided to go to London and record albums, one together with both of them, and a separate album each. And uh
And um Bing did a great version of uh Once in a While, which I really like. And uh Fred did um Attitude Dancing, which is the name of his album, and on that was uh Wonderful Baby and uh I went to visit him while he was there and uh met him at the Connaught Hotel and uh He appeared in his blazer and open shirt ascot with a sash around his waist instead of a belt. And uh Gucci loafers and gray slacks and he was just um
He's a beautiful thing. I mean he was always a beautiful thing. You see him dance, he makes you cry. And there are not too many dances you can watch where tears come to your eyes. This is a a human being. doing something that is so damn beautiful. And that's what I miss are people doing beautiful things that just make you cry. Not ugly things or loud things or grossly overdone things, which is show business now, you know, it's all
bloviating and uh explosive and you just tune it all out after a while, you know. It was like but you look at a beautiful dance sequence like from Top Hat or Swing Time and you'll You'll see the very highest endeavor of a human being.
I can see why that song would have appealed to him'cause it's such a graceful melody, isn't it?
It's a little soft shoe, you know. Kind of underful baby living on love, you know, he's just She can hear him almost dancing to it. He was a great singer. A third of all the great pop songs by the great pop songwriters were written for Fred Astaire and his movies, and Frank Sinatra. recorded all those and even one for my baby was recorded originally for Fred Esther. It was in a movie called uh Skyscraper or something like that.
So Sinatra did his repertoire, you know, and uh Crosby's repertoire, and then a whole new repertoire was written for Sinatra and he did all three of them together and he probably did'em all like three times each. So that's it. That's the essence of the greatest pop songs ever.
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Where the girl
Girls fly on ribbon.
Where babies? Just can't be a little bit more than a little bit.
¶ The Chilling Story of Andrew McCrew
And at the other end of the spectrum, Legend of Andrew McCrew is just a striking song built on an absolutely chilling story, isn't it?
Well let me tell you a little bit about that. I read a story, a small story in the Wall Street Journal. No, it was the New York Times. Said Mummy buried in Dallas and this was like nineteen seventy four. Just a column maybe three inches.
And one of the wonderful uh and the sick things that was done in the South that we uh look back on so uh with such great uh sadness is that they would take a a guy like him and dress him up as a mummy and put a tuxedo on him and call him the amazing petrified man. And this is a pretty sick thing to do to a human being, but this was entertainment back in the thirties in certain parts of the South. So my friend Lee Hayes, who came from Arkansas and sang with the Weavers,
I went and told him the story and he he was retired at that time. He would sit and watch the T V and suck back the Budweisers and we'd sit together and he thought for a moment, he said, I saw that mummy. So when he was a kid in the thirties he saw that mummy. So I wrote the song and all kinds of things happened. At that time I was a major recording artist so that everything I did got paid a lot of attention.
And a radio station in Chicago s put on a program to try to raise money to buy a headstone for Andrew McCrew. So they raised this money and they carved the headstone and they actually dug him up and reburied him in the Lincoln Cemetery in Dallas, Texas. It was covered by all the black publications in Texas, and the headstone was put there with my lyrics on it. So that's the story.
There was a moment.
Are you generally quite interested in people? Is that how you see the the potential song in a story like that or or you know, a song like uh Bronco Bill's Lament, something like that?
Yes. I think people are what matter, and um biographies interest me. How people get through life. I guess there's a series of these, George Reeves is another one. Sister Fatima There's a bunch of'em not come to think of it. I think it has to do with how it strikes me and um if it would benefit people to hear about it, like
the Superman story is a very American story,'cause Americans are supermen, you know, and America is a super country. And so here's this guy who's He gets shot and he didn't commit suicide, George Reeves.
And he was stuck in this role of Superman and faster than a speeding bullet, you know, and he'd be standing there in a suit and the bullets would be bouncing off him, you know. Well, when he would make public appearances he would appear in the Superman suit and a kid brought a real gun to try and see if it with bullets would bounce off.
Jeez.
And they were jumping out of windows and killing themselves. I mean all kinds of stuff was happening from this uh show when we were kids growing up. So I thought that was uh, you know, um something to write about. But Andrew McCrew thing is particularly sad, disgraceful, really.
Yeah. It's a really unusual story that, isn't it? I think he was buried in the seventies, but he died sort of around nineteen thirteen or something like that.
Yeah, and reburied after the song came out.
Incredible. Yeah. But I think by capturing those stories, you know, you really create some vivid images for people to engage with these songs. I think it's quite important, isn't it, that songwriters kinda get out of their own heads a bit.
Oh, that's the worst. I mean, when people are always talking about themselves, I hate that. I mean I've done some of it, Pride Parade and some of these songs I wrote. I want songs that are useful for people. I wrote a song on the Believers album. Which is uh got some nice things on it. One of them is Love Letters Straight from Your Heart, played by the the greatest musicians in Nashville and I love that version of it. But also on that Believers album is a song called Seaman.
And that's a true story about a man I met in Israel when I was over there a lot. And uh He lived in a house he made with um metal, mesh, and clay, and it was a gigantic fish. And he had animals in the back and uh he was sort of squatting. on the edge of the sea, and the Israelis, you know, loved him. He was a character. They'd come and visit and So I wrote the song and put that on uh the album Believers. And someday they will come.
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Oh he has not a permit from the kings of the town and the doctor.
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And the pictures he kept will be round from his hand with the beautiful house.
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¶ Song Titles, Emotional Depth, and Breath Control
One of the first things that captures a listener's attention I guess is the title and you've got some great ones over the years, haven't you? Left for Dead on the Road of Love is one of my favorites.
Thank you.
Are they important to your titles? Do you write to titles sometimes?
I love titles. I love titles. It's very important that the title jumps off the page. When I saw American Pie, when I came up with that, I thought, Oh my God, that is it. That inspired me to write the song. Right. I came up with it, I don't know how I did it, but there it was. And uh other titles, yes, uh Superman's Ghost, uh in prime time, you know, Headroom is a good one because.
Most of the time we're always, you know, in the studio and they mean do you have any more volume level left? Do you have any more headroom? But um that song is all about people quietly going mad with so much in their heads. There's no more room and so much to worry about and so much pressure.
And it's all gonna change once we come out of this pandemic, but the amount of text messages and emails that a a regular working person has to be responsible for and quickly is enough to drive a person bonkers.
And it's kind of fascinating to us how so many of your songs can be sort of so alive with with feeling and emotion after all these years. It's like you've bottled some kind of essence back then and it's it's still there when you go back.
No, it's not what happens. I suffer a lot. I'm in a lot of emotional pain for a lot of reasons and I always have been for one reason or another. Either it's something I'm involved with or about to get involved with or I can see around a corner. that something's coming up that's gonna be real painful, or I think back on something that hurts. And you have to be constantly making yourself mentally healthy in order to keep on because you cannot
forget these things, but you can't indulge yourself either. You know, I have a photographic memory and I go back to childhood. I can even remember the little thing that was on my crib, you know, I can remember everything. And things that happened that were bad or painful when I was young, I still think about that come into my head and all through my life. So Unfortunately, that leads me to stay away from people.
quite a bit because I don't want to hear stuff and I don't want things to happen that I'm gonna have to think about. But, you know, nonetheless, I you know, I'm a performer and I love people. I love singing for them, but That's part of what motivates me to be a little bit of an isolationist.
And your presentation of the ideas is interesting as well, isn't it? Like I was listening to Castles in the Air today and just the way the words flow in that, you barely have time to take a breath.
Well, that's interesting because when I was young, I was listening to everything that everybody else was listening to. But I kind of discovered Sinatra. about nineteen sixty five with the album The September of My Years. It was a big college album, believe it or not. And I began to listen to the the phrasing and the breath control.
And one of the things that I learned from him was that he could always make a song seem like anybody could sing it. A lot of the great pop singers, uh Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Holiday, um, Nat Cole They would sing a song, you wouldn't even try to sing that song. Any song Frank sang was right in the pocket. You could start singing that song. Cause he made it accessible.
and he also had tremendous breath control and I had been trained by a an opera teacher when I was twelve and by going back to pop music and especially through Sinatra And reading about him I started improving my breath control. so that I could take those long phrases that you just mentioned and not take a breath. And that's my standard still today. Like I don't run or anything, but I will go out and take twenty five deep breaths, even ten, and exhale all the way. And you do that in the evening.
Your breath control after a week will be twenty-five percent better than it was before. As simple as that. That's simple.
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¶ Authenticity, Melodic Approach, and Vincent
True. And that kind of opera training, do you think that had any sort of impact when you went on to kind of write melodies, sort of how you thought melodically?
Yeah, everything I do is instinct. You know you had Dylan around there from the beginning and everybody was always trying to copy Bob Dylan. He's had an enormous effect on everybody. and groups and how they sing and uh young people and songwriting and all that. I went the other way. I was trying to write songs like with diction, melody, vibrato. Complete opposite. Why? Because trying to do anything close to what he would do is just not me.
So I always did what was right for me and took it all away. Vincent's a perfect example of me taking what I do all the way. I'm singing about another guy. I'm singing a very melodic, beautiful song about a an artist. And it's unabashed and it's just what it is. I don't care, you know, I just go wherever it takes me. But I I wanna be the most authentic Don McLean that I can possibly be.
And so I've always felt that way. Even on this last album, Botanical Gardens, there's a song there called When July Comes.
Yeah, love that one.
I'm very proud of that record and of that song and of that way it is created musically. It's almost a bit symphonic and yet it's very simple. And um the idea morphed really into this sad song really about the intensity of love on the beach and remembering that person that you were in love with, with the sweat and the sand and the heat and the beautiful sky and everything, you're all part of nature. It's all about desire.
And it oddly came from something that my caretaker in Maine said to me, because he's an old New Englander, you know. And we were working up one summer to July fourth. And he said to me, Damn it all, he says comes the fourth of July and the summer's over. And I thought for a minute, I said, first of all, you've ruined summer for me, okay? Because I'll never forget that.
Perfect example of why I try to stay away from hearing things like that. It stayed in my head. It did ruin my summers from then on, because every time the fourth of July comes, I thought well it's over. Before you know it, it'll be fall. But I used it, you know, for that song, When July Comes, you know, it's later than you think. All that just came from that one remark.
There's something almost um cinematic sound in the mo that song as well. The open and motif in particular sounds almost reminiscent of of a Bond theme.
Oh wow, that's interesting. Wow. Gee, I never thought about that. I do love Daniel Craig. I think he is uh the best Bond ever, and I wish somebody would ask me to write a song for one of those movies, but I'm an old geezer now and I don't get those kind of requests. But uh I do it though. But no, I don't know where this stuff comes from. I really don't. It's in me.
And uh when it's ready to come out it will. And I would have never anticipated that last album, Botanical Gardens, because I hadn't made a record in like eight years and um you know, I'd done other things and Time flies, you know. You know, they say that uh life and time are like a roll of toilet paper. The closer you get to the end, the faster it spins. So the years go by, seven or eight years go by and what you That roll is spinning fast.
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So those very sort of delicate, beautiful melodies like An I Love You So or Vincent, are they all sort of proceeding from you sitting down with a guitar? Is that the typical mode?
Yep, they've come off guitar figures that I played. Falling Through Time is another one. Came off a guitar figure that's on the Don McClain album, the third album I made. Um a song called um The Three of Us, which I wrote on the album called Addicted to Black, which will be one of of the eleven albums that we're uploading. That also came off of a guitar figure.
You know, a lot of folk guitarists like uh Joni Mitchell and um others know a lot of tunings that I believe that um Crosby Stills and Nash know a lot of tunings and I never do that because I want to take the time to get back into the standard tuning. But what I do do is create what sounds like a tuning by making a figure or putting my fingers in funny places on the fingerboard in order to get
what sounds like an open tuning and then work off of that because it can be very inspirational. Sometimes a chord change will do it too, like in the song Crying, I love that song. It goes from a C I think to a C augmented
🔊 Chant
Da da da da da da And that's a lot like other songs that Roy wrote, like uh Blue Bayou and like Only the Lonely. They all had uh sections of them that sounded similar because he was hung up on that change. The Fleetwoods used to do this uh come softly. It would be do so.
Doo bee doo da.
B doob bee doo. And I said, you know, Roy Orbison has got a dumb dooby-doo in there somewhere in one of those songs. And darn if I didn't read that that influenced him, you know, that he heard that and he wanted to he wanted to get that in there somewhere. That's kind of what happens, you know.
They have a kind of a hymn like quality to me, some of those songs, like Vincent for example. They bring that to mind for me.
Well I received a beautiful letter from From one of my aunts. My mother uh was Italian. Her parents came from Italy. And she spoke Italian. I don't, but it's more Italian and Greek in me than anything. Uh but there's also a good dose of Scottish as well. An unlikely combo. But she wrote me a beautiful letter and she said that my songs were like prayers. And I kept that letter and I never thought about it that way, but
I suppose that the grandeur of the Catholic Church must have had an effect on me in some way. I know I hated church. and I had to go to religious instructions on Wednesday and then I went to Catholic high school and studied theology for four years and had to wear a tie and a jacket. It was a prep school. And then I went to Catholic college and studied theology for four more years until I completely lost my faith. It was very effective at doing that.
I think if I were to be anything I'd probably be a Buddhist. I like them. Right. I like that attitude about people. Love people. Be giving. Don't be clutching and grasping and take life by the smooth handle, that's what uh Thomas Jefferson used to say. And I am real become that way as I've gotten older, you know. Let it go, you know, just let it go. It's uh It's not worth worrying about. And boy, it took me my whole life to figure that out, I'll tell you, because I worried about everything.
And when it came to writing Vincent, was that kind of a daunting task to write about such a a well known figure as him?
No, it was fun. I mean it was one of the few songs that was fun to write. A lot of them aren't,'cause you know there's something in there and you gotta get to it and you keep trying and it isn't getting there. So you're racking your brain trying to figure out what you're missing and that ain't fun. But this was right there. I looked at the painting and I wrote the song. And it just happened. Everything was there. The color, the sadness, the pain, the openness, the breeze, the heat.
The sun, the night, the quiet, the clarity of the stars in a Beautiful sky. It was all there. I just looked at the painting and the painting told me how to write the song.
You do capture the paintings really effectively actually. Flaming flowers that brightly blaze, swirling clouds and violet haze, all of that stuff really I mean it conjures up the image immediately, doesn't it?
I tried.
We think you succeeded.
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¶ The Genesis and Production of American Pie
Unlike um probably the vast majority of your songs, American Pie begins with piano. Does that mean it was written kinda that way, or was it just arranged for piano later?
No, I was in love with the piano. Ed Freeman knew more damn piano players than you can shake a stick at. I mean he knew all kinds of piano players. We have uh Chuck Lovell who plays with the Stones. He's on a bunch of my records. Right. He's on the Playin' Favorites album. He plays on, oh, you know, Mule Skinner Blues and Mountains of Mourn and all sorts of songs that are on there. Chuck Lovell, he's a almost a another member of the Rolling Stones. And many others
The big one, of course, was um Paul Griffin. And Paul Griffin was The man who really saved the American Pie track because we got in the opening, uh Ed was very good at these things. He found this wonderful piano player and had this glorious opening piano thing. I mean it's so musical and I would sing to that. And then me on the guitar singing the lyric. And then bop, the drum hits, and we're into the the rock and roll middle of that song, which just smokes.
And it was Paul Griffin's piano that drives that whole thing and my acoustic guitar that drove him. And when the track was over, everybody was so relieved because I spent two weeks arguing with these guys, telling them they weren't doing it right. And everybody was looking at me like I was crazy'cause they were all big shots, you know. And they were all session musicians. And who's this guy telling us we're not doing it right? I said, I ain't what I'm hearing.
So once Paul came in and started to play that stride gospel piano, which is so exciting, that was what we brought into that song. That gospel feel is what's in that song. courtesy of Paul Griffin. And then we had Warren Bernhardt, who's a magnificent piano player, do crossroads. Ooh, what a beautiful, sensitive track that is.
Yeah.
There must have been six piano players on American Pie, easy, on the album. Right.
I think that is one of the great uh accomplishments of that track. Obviously, you know, it has this whole dimension that talks about American culture and politics and protest and faith and all of those things, but Actually just making a great record out of that and having it sustained for eight minutes is a massive challenge, isn't it?
You work backwards from the record. Without the record, without the hit, you wouldn't be talking about the song.
Yeah.
It would have been another song that laid there on an album that nobody heard. So that's the key. And there's so many hoops that you gotta jump through. In order to get to the position that I'm in in the music business, which is, you know, I'm no Paul McCartney and I'm no Bob Dylan, but I'm no uh Pipsqueak either. I'm in the middle somewhere and it's forever. To get there, you need great people to help you because you can't make those records by yourself. Most all real recording artists.
spent their lives with their ear next to the Victrola, which is the old term for the record player. RCA Victor Victrola. And as a little boy, that's where I was, on the set of steps going upstairs, and the record player was there, and I was inside that speaker. And I'd play a song a hundred times. One time
I was always at home sick and my grandmother was taking care of me and I was playing this song. I must have been to the hundredth time. And she begged me to please stop. Please don't play that again. I said, I have to. So she let me'cause she was very sweet. But that's why we were able to make records. Because we can listen way deep inside. And uh, you know, what I heard crying coming back to me over the speakers without even the strings on it.
I started to cry, my tears went in my eyes. This is absolutely amazing. And Larry Butler was an amazing producer, but you need a man like that, genius. Like Ed is a genius, Joel Dorne was a genius, and they work with guys like me and they help us get this stuff across to the public. But without them, you know, you wouldn't be talking about me or my songs.
Yeah.
¶ American Pie's Enduring Impact and Influences
I guess um with American Pie, even with all the sort of epicness of it, the sophistication of of the lyrics and the kind of mystery behind the song. And the way so many people interpret it and things, it just has a direct appeal at the end of the day, doesn't it? Like that chorus, it's such an undeniable, catchy, hoppy chorus.
You know, I was always guilty of good diction. You know, in the world of Bob Dylan, I was the good diction guy and I was the guy who sang the notes and sang melodies. I was the opposite of what he did so brilliantly and still is doing. So I had good diction and I wanted you to hear the ends of words, but by the same token.
With an attitude like that, you don't want to appear to be haughty or supercilious or above, you know, the average person. So, you know, I would always write songs that were direct and didn't use a whole lot of fancy words, some, but told the story in a unadorned but colorful way of using poetry. Actually on this uh new album that I'm coming out with, called Still Playin' Favorites, like forty years or fifty years after the original Playin Favorites, on the record is a Dylan song.
that I've always loved called Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine. Mm-hmm. And my son loves Dylan. He said, I really heard the lyrics, you know, when you played me that version. So I don't know. Hard to explain. It has to do with the way you want to sound. I already knew how I wanted to look, how I wanted to sound, who I am.
What I think
I don't need a lot of help in those areas.
But the communication comes across really clearly, doesn't it? I mean when we were sort of sixteen we used to go to the Cavern Club in Liverpool on a Saturday night and people would be singing American Pie all night long. You know, that message just lands wherever you go. Really, it's amazing.
Well, you know, I mean the Beatles were a big influence on me because of the the diversity of things they did. They never stuck to one sound, and that's me. You know, there's Dradel and there's Wonderful Baby, you know, and uh So you hear it coming out that way? Do it. You know, don't even think twice about it. Don't think oh that's not a Don McClane song. Well it is after you do it.
Yeah.
You know, and the Beatles never thought about that when they did a beautiful song like Because. I mean, did you ever imagine anybody could do something that beautiful? It's like a little flower opening. Oh God, I mean it's just gorgeous, you know? Mm-hmm. And you jump in on uh the one after nine oh nine or you know, any of these other fun tunes and then you get into this
Really amazing Sergeant Pepper. You know, the the cover of that album, as well as the album, it cast a shadow and a spell on me and everybody else. But the cover of it. It got me starting making collages. And I made two of them, and one was a Western collage, and half of that is the cover of the Western album.
Right.
It's twice as big. That's only half of it that's on the cover of that Western album. But the idea of fun imagery was also in my mind doing American Pie from the cover of that album. And I knew some very good artists and One of them was Thomas B. Allen and he did work for me on the solo album. He did the inside cover, which I wanted to be the cover. It should have been, but it ended up inside. And then I had a wonderful artist named Marcote from Spain.
who did the cover of the Homeless Brother album, and uh in the inside there are a beautiful pair of boots. Those two paintings are you know, more important than that album could ever be. He was amazing. And then The Marty Robbins album, Tom Was Back in My Life Again, and the children's album, Thomas B. Allen, did those and I have all that stuff on the walls in my home in Maine.
Well, uh Don, I think we've kept you long enough. This has been um just wonderful chatting with you. We really appreciate you taking the time.
Well, do you have anything else you want to ask me?
Well I was gonna ask you originally if you ever considered using The Day the Music Died as the title of American Pie, but you said that you actually proceeded to write that song from those words?
That's right. Once I saw that, that was the title. That was the title of the song, the title of the album, and that was everything started to just radiate out of that.
Yeah. And that phrase, I mean the day the music died is just part of the lexicon now, isn't it? Everybody knows what that means.
Well they've chopped up the song in a lot of ways. You know, they take bits and pieces of it. You know, there's you'll see uh a long, long time ago an bad news on the doorstep, or you know, the day the music died or the day whatever died, they'll make parodies out of it. It's the height of satisfaction to somebody like me because
I suppose you could say it's become a folk song. Yeah. And that's a good place to to end this interview because that's the apex, you know. It's up there. This land is your land as a folk song. And actually Woody Guthrie didn't write that that way. His original chorus took uh something from the Irving Berlin song, God Blessed America for you and me.
So he was good that was what he was gonna say. God blessed America for you and me, a clumsy kind of and somebody straightened him out about that. Now that's no good. And he wrote, You know, this land was made for you and me so It's a process. Yeah.
I think it's fifty years since American Pie cast its particular spell on everyone.
Yes, and I have uh most of my hair and uh I can sing all the songs in the same keys and man, I'm I'm doing good.
You're doing alright, aren't you?
I am.
Well thanks for that, Don. That was great fun. Really enjoyed hearing about the songs.
Thank you, thanks for all the good questions. Very enjoyable. Thank you.
Ah cheers.
Take care, boys. See you again sometime.
Thanks a lot.
And they were singing.
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¶ Reflections on Don McLean's Legacy
That was Don McLean talking to us from his home about his incredible catalogue of songs through the years. It was, he's clearly a deep thinker and a bit of a philosopher, isn't he?
Yeah, well he's revealed that, hasn't he, through those very thoughtful songs, epics like American Pie. But he's also a lover of music as well, isn't he?
He is, yeah, he he really knows the work of Dylan and the Beatles and Sonata and all the greats, but he's also a Devo fan too, it seems. I'd love to hear his take on Whipit.
We're bit good, Donny. I think what you'll find is that anyone working at his level is probably just a student of great songwriting anyway, don't you think?
Absolutely, yeah. And uh what he said about variety was interesting too.
I guess that's true of his first album isn't it and I love you so sit alongside orphans of wealth
Yeah, that they sit on the same album is kind of testament to the scope of his writing, isn't it?
Yeah. And getting to talk about American Pie with its creator.
Well, you know, it's another kind of pinch yourself moment, that isn't it? It's always such a pleasure to talk about those songs that have become so ingrained in the culture.
And I was glad to learn a little bit more about how he makes the record as well,'cause as he pointed out, the way we understand the songs is through the success of the recording pretty much.
Definitely, yeah. I mean that's something we've touched on before, you know, I guess th a song is often only as strong as the record in a way.
And American Pie is an overwhelming slice of popular culture, isn't it, to try and unpack.
Oh god, yeah, you know, after fifty years people are still trying to solve that mystery. So uh I'm glad we were able to talk about it without trying to solve it, you know,'cause I I don't think he's gonna give up that info, is he?
Yeah, yeah, we'd have a better chance finding out who killed JFK at this point, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah, I doubt those kids at the cavern in nineteen ninety seven were uh reflecting on the loss of American innocence.
But yeah, the song worked for us then, didn't it? And it works for us now in a different kind of emotional register I suppose.
That's the beauty of of songs, isn't it? They can just take on a a different meaning as you get older.
Absolutely. So thanks to Don for taking the time out. Cheers to Joel and Jeremy and everyone who helped make that happen.
Check out Don's albums on all the streaming platforms. So many gems there that you might not be familiar with along with the uh timeless classics of course.
And we'll be back soon with more good stuff.
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