Don McLean with awards, October 2019, (By Jeremy Westby – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)
‘Everything is so loud and in such a hurry now’
In the summer of 2019, Jason Barnard called Don McLean from Yorkshire. McLean picked up in Maine. Over forty-four minutes they talked about Vincent van Gogh, Drake, Buddy Holly’s plane and George Michael’s courage. Don McLean, then 73 years old, was at home.
McLean remains one of the central figures in the American songbook. He wrote one of the most analysed songs in the history of popular music, a song that spent four weeks at the top of the Billboard chart in early 1972 and for nearly fifty years held the record as the longest song ever to reach number one. He wrote “Vincent”, which reached number one in the United Kingdom and became inseparable from the popular image of Van Gogh. Perry Como turned McLean’s “And I Love You So” into a standard and Elvis Presley sang nightly near the end of his life. He wrote anti-war songs that much of the industry ignored until George Michael, in early 2003, stood on Top of the Pops and sang one of them with the Iraq invasion approaching. And he kept writing, recording as recently as 2018, when Botanical Gardens appeared, a record he was proud of. “They spent a lot of money on it,” he said of BMG, with the honesty that characterises his assessment of the music business, “so they really should have done a little more. But I’m just glad I got it out.”
The Three Kinds of Music
We began with Botanical Gardens. He described it without hesitation as “a romantic album,” one that “revolves around getting older” and is shot through with what he called yearning, a word that surfaced repeatedly throughout our conversation. Among the tracks he singled out was “When July Comes,” a measured, reflective piece that sits closer to the Great American Songbook than folk or rock and roll.
McLean traces his songwriting to three sources.
“Old fashioned popular music, like George Gershwin and Irving Berlin,” he said. “And I like folk music. And then rock and roll. Those are the three kinds of music that I put together in my writing. Oh my God, they’re so sophisticated. I’m not up to that level.” But almost immediately came the counterpoint. “‘And I Love You So’ did pretty well, though. That’s pretty close to one of their type of songs. And was definitely accepted as a pop song.”
He is particularly interested in what he calls controlling a slow song.
“I love slow songs,” he said. “I spent a lot of time as a young guy trying to learn to control a slow song. So ‘Vincent’ and ‘Empty Chairs’… I love controlling the time in those songs. Everything is so loud and, you know, in such a hurry now. And everything is a big distraction.”
Nervous Wreck in the Studio: Tapestry and Castles in the Air
His debut album, Tapestry, was released in 1970 on Mediarts Records. It contained “Castles in the Air,” which would later become a hit in a re-recorded version, and “And I Love You So,” which would eventually travel further than almost any song McLean wrote. The making of it, he recalled, was miserable.
“I was a nervous wreck making the Tapestry album. I had a terrible manager, a guy named Herb Gart, who just made everything worse. And so he was around. I was spending money I didn’t have. We did not have a record deal. So I was going into debt doing this stuff, just out of college.”
The musicians were good and the string arrangements, by Ed Bogus, were beautiful. But something was off. “Castles in the Air kind of had a lurching, nervous feel to it.”
Things changed later in the decade when McLean went to Nashville and worked with producer Larry Butler.
“Larry Butler, who was a hit maker, I mean, this guy had ears for days. He really knew what a hit was. We made hits: ‘Since I Don’t Have You,’ ‘Castles in the Air,’ and the big ‘Crying,’ which was number one everywhere.”
Butler heard the song afresh and wanted it done again. “We locked into a whole different attitude,” McLean said, “and it was a real good groove and the song took off.”
He gave Buddy Holly as an example.
“If you see Buddy Holly’s versions of ‘That’ll Be the Day’ before he cut them in New Mexico, they just don’t work. But then he gets the right vibe, the right groove going… the thing is just right in the pocket. You can have a great song, but if you don’t make a great record out of it, it’s not going to get heard.”
‘He Was a Lonely Person’: And I Love You So and Elvis
“And I Love You So” kept finding new lives after McLean recorded it. Perry Como’s version reached millions in the early seventies. Then Elvis Presley took it up.
By the time McLean and I spoke, the song had been played at a royal wedding and Quentin Tarantino, whom McLean described simply as “a friend of mine,” had danced to it with his new wife.
“He told me how much he loved the song,” McLean said. “They requested that. Megan and Harry’s wedding. And And I Love You So.”
McLean then discussed Elvis.
“This is after the song was already… it sold a million, you know, and everybody and his mother had recorded this song. Then Elvis, at the end, does it and took it to a whole other level.”
“He was very happy to sing the song. I’m delighted I was able to give him something that he enjoyed doing. It meant something to him because he was a lonely person. And the song talks about loneliness. There’s no more Elvis Presleys. And there won’t be any more Dylans or Jaggers or Don McLeans very soon. And you’re going to be left with Taylor Swift, which is, I suppose, not so bad, but it ain’t Elvis, you know.”
‘It Just Came Out of Me’: The Writing of American Pie
“American Pie” was released in November 1971 and reached number one in January 1972. At eight minutes and forty-two seconds it remains one of the longest songs ever to top the Billboard Hot 100.
McLean was thirteen years old in New Rochelle, New York, on the morning of 3 February 1959 when he opened a newspaper bundle and read about the plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper.
McLean has said that the memory became the starting point for “the day the music died.” The song arrived in stages over several months. McLean remembers its opening section coming first.
“The long, long time ago part, through the day the music died, that whole segment, it just came out of me completely full-blown.”
At the time, McLean was dealing with industry turmoil. Mediarts collapsed while he was working on his second album before United Artists Records stepped in.
“I think by that time I’d written ‘American Pie,’ and they were all very excited.”
He spoke at length about Alan Livingston, the former Capitol Records executive he greatly admired, and about the records Livingston had overseen, from Frank Sinatra and the Kingston Trio to the Beach Boys and the Beatles.
“This record label became so hip,” he said of Capitol. “They weren’t stodgy like RCA or Columbia.” They were a hip California label. They built that beautiful building, which is a stack of 45s. And they had these great echo chambers that were under the parking lot. You can’t beat chamber echo. That’s what you hear on all those records.”
Livingston was excited about McLean. Mediarts, despite Livingston’s enthusiasm, could not sustain itself. And United Artists, which took McLean on with “American Pie” already written, was, in his estimation, the wrong home for an artist of his kind.
“They were a terrible record company. They had no sensitivity. They were basically a record company that put out soundtrack albums.” The Beatles’ Help! soundtrack had come out on United Artists. So had easy-listening acts McLean described, with mild disgust, as “cornball stuff my Uncle Herbie liked.” He should have stayed, he believed. “By the time the 70s ended, they had Kenny Rogers and all these people making hits. And they were smoking. And I should have stayed with them.” He didn’t. “And then kind of didn’t have the focus that I would have had if I’d stayed, I suppose.”
McLean also saw the song as a record of the changing music business he encountered as a young artist: from the studio system of the fifties, where “the singers sang the songs, the writers wrote the songs, the producers produced them,” to the suddenly open and chaotic world of the sixties, where everyone was expected to do everything themselves.
“You have to write all your songs, find the right producer, find the right arranger, find the right studio, get a record company, do the whole damn thing yourself. And there’s a lot of arguing because you’re not in a system where guys know exactly what to do.” He compared his situation to Sinatra’s. “He had the goods as a singer and all he needed, the songs were written for him and the arrangers were there and the record company made these beautiful records. I’m out there and guys like me are out there making this stuff up.”
Reading a Biography on the Veranda: Vincent
McLean wrote “Vincent” in the autumn of 1970 while living in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, having found work singing in schools. One morning, sitting on a veranda, he was reading a biography of Van Gogh when the idea arrived.
He was twenty-four, recently free of a conventional life, and resistant to anything that resembled settling down.
“I was just so glad to be out of school, away from teachers,” he said. “It was 1968, 69, 70, 71, those years. I did not want to work for anybody. I did not want to settle down. I did not want to be a pillar of the community. I wanted to ramble. I wanted to go places and sing and meet people and just do whatever I wanted.”
If an idea came to him, he would sit down with the guitar and see where it went. “So if an idea occurred to me, I would sit down and get the guitar and see what we can do with that, you know.”
The biography also changed the way McLean understood Van Gogh: the understanding that Van Gogh’s difficulties were not the product of simple madness but of an illness, one he shared with his brother Theo. McLean wanted to write a song arguing that Van Gogh “wasn’t crazy.” He sat with a print of The Starry Night and let the painting tell him what to say.
Released as the second single from the American Pie album in 1972, “Vincent” went to number twelve in the United States and number one in the United Kingdom.
Songs Above the Glass Ceiling
At one point McLean drew a distinction that seemed important to him. He talked about songs that sit above what he called “a glass ceiling” in contemporary music, songs that have stopped being of any particular era.
“A song like ‘Vincent’ or ‘American Pie’ is above normal,” he said. “A lot of my stuff would be up there because I’m an old artist who did some things that people remember, but they’ve also been sort of timeless. They’re not dated, at least it doesn’t seem that way, because they end up in movies and all kinds of places.”
He paused on Ed Sheeran as the closest contemporary equivalent he could point to. “People play his music all the time, and I’m sure some of his stuff will be around a long time from now.” The test, for McLean, is whether a song keeps gaining momentum rather than fading. “It’s going to be tough for some of the stuff that’s around now, and has been around the last ten years, to be in that place where they’re untouchable and they keep gaining momentum. I don’t hear any songs that I…”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
‘He Stood Up There and Said: No, This Is Not Right’: The Grave
“The Grave” appeared on the original American Pie album in 1971. McLean wrote it during the Vietnam War, as a soldier’s-eye-view of a young man in a trench who has effectively been placed in his own grave. It is one of his least famous songs outside the community of people who care about it deeply. George Michael was one of those people. He had first heard it at seven years old, and by his own account it formed his understanding of what war actually is.
In early 2003, as the invasion of Iraq was being prepared, Michael recorded a cover version; he performed it on Top of the Pops on 7 March — his first appearance on that programme in seventeen years. He also performed it on the Graham Norton Show.
“He sang a magnificent version, way better than anything I ever did. And it was time, he was brave, he stood up there and said, no, this is not right. And everybody knew it wasn’t right.”
He connected this to the broader climate of fear he believed the post-9/11 period had created in American public life. “Because they had 9/11, they could pass that Patriot Act. And if you said too much, you’re going to go to jail and you’d never get out.” He was emphatic about what he felt this had done to the culture of dissent. “People are afraid to say anything… that’s why we live in such a fearful time.”
The contrast with the sixties was real, he argued. “The 60s, people shot their mouths off.”
He also highlighted “1967,” from his 1991 album Headroom, a song he described as being featured in the American Troubadour documentary. Its subject is the same essential tragedy: “how in the world, after all this time, do we devolve into destroying each other, and not be able to reach some sort of accommodation to prevent pointless death.”
The dehumanisation that makes war possible particularly appalled him. “We demonize and dehumanize some subject that we’re going after and then we feel that we have the right to kill them. You know, call them g**ks, w*gs, whatever. They’re nothing, they’re not even human, kill all you want. It’s awful. And it’s something we haven’t progressed on.”
Yearning, Aging and Oh My What a Shame
McLean talks about getting older without trying to dress it up. It has become a recurring subject in his writing. He is interested in the subject, and some of his best writing has grown from it.
“Oh My What a Shame,” from the 1973 album Don McLean, was inspired in part by the folk song “The Water Is Wide,” with its image of a boat “that can carry two.” For McLean, it became a song about getting older and watching things disappear.
“What does it all mean,” he said, “if a person gets Alzheimer’s, God forbid, they don’t even know their family. What does it all mean if you don’t know anything? You know, it’s very… as you get older, you reach the closer to the end of the diving board, things start to come unravelled. And even though you’re still around, you know, there’s all this stuff that’s happening, and indications in the fact that whatever this experience was, it’s not the same as it was, and it isn’t going to last forever.”
He linked this to “I Was Always Young” from Addicted to Black, released in 2000, and to the general current of yearning that runs through his work.
“It’s a very common theme for me. A lot of yearning. I don’t have regrets. But I love things, you know, and I miss things. Sometimes I think, gee, if I’m not around anymore, I won’t even be able to see the sky. Everything matters to me because I realised it’s all fleeting. And it’s also beautiful.”
Drake and the Primetime Discovery
“Primetime” appeared on McLean’s 1977 album of the same name. He wrote it partly out of an awareness, unusual for 1977, that machines were beginning to change the way music was made and experienced. “I realised I had an awareness that hit me in about 1976 that machines were going to start making music and that people were going to start acting like machines. And this is before Devo came around.” He cited Chaplin’s Modern Times as the image he was reaching for.
“It’s a frantic song about, again, a mad wild type of a country completely out of control, and everything is up for grabs depending on what comes up on the magic wheel.”
It had largely been forgotten by the general public by 2019. Then Drake found it. The rapper sampled two songs from the Prime Time album and built a multi-platinum track called “Doing It Wrong” around them.
“Drake, being this commercial genius that he is, made a multi-platinum song called ‘Doing It Wrong’ out of my two songs. So I actually am a co-writer on this very successful Drake track. And to me, it’s worth making the albums just to have young people with a different point of view about music, a different point of view about art, to maybe find a musical idea or something they can use.”
‘Every Word Matters’
Near the end of our conversation, McLean returned to the importance of words. He had talked about the studio-system writers of the forties and fifties, Gershwin, Berlin, the Hollywood screenwriters brought in to produce the scripts of that era. All of them, in his view, shared a seriousness about the English language that he no longer sees in the same abundance.
“Whether it’s a simple lyric or a complicated one like ‘American Pie,’ every word matters. But I don’t see the English language meaning as much to people as it did then. People are not as concerned. They blather their way through with a bunch of bullshit and don’t really say anything. And so that’s a big difference. The respect for the English language and the simplicity of ideas and poetry in the writing, in movies and in songs.”
He was planning to bring his band to the UK for shows in late August and early September, the same band he had been playing with for years. He mentioned that Botanical Gardens had a thematic coherence, that yearning running underneath all of it, in the same way that the American Pie album had needed “By the Waters of Babylon,” the ancient song that Lee Hays played him one afternoon, to bring the whole thing together.
“He said, listen to this song. And he played me ‘By the Waters of Babylon.’ And I thought, oh, it’d be so great to finish the record. So I made an arrangement of it and put that on there. And that became very famous. One of the first, probably the most famous version before the Fugees.” He was “always wide open,” he said, “to whatever might be around, to use it.”
We closed on “Primetime” and its connection to the political moment of 2019, with a reality television star in the White House. McLean had no particular animosity towards Trump, but he found the situation interesting in the way a songwriter finds almost everything interesting, as material.
“That’s America,” he said. “My country is not a neat situation. It never is.”
