“The music business is full of thieves!” Don McLean declares. “Luckily, I had a degree in finance and so I was always watching the numbers. But promoters, publishers, club owners, you name it, they’re all out to rob you blind, so you have to watch out for that.”
More than five decades after “American Pie” established him as one of America’s most celebrated songwriters, McLean remains every bit as outspoken, self-assured and suspicious of the music industry as he was when he started out. Those qualities have served him well. McLean is one of the few artists of his era to retain control of his catalog and master recordings, having resisted the temptation to sign away the rights to his songs.
But if there’s one theme that runs through his career, it’s a refusal to listen to people who told him what he could or couldn’t do.
“Well, the thing is that I’ve been kicked around by a lot of writers and stuff in different time periods, but I have always outfoxed them,” he says. “In the beginning, when I did ‘American Pie,’ they all said, ‘You can’t follow it, blah, blah, blah.’ I heard two years of this crap and then ‘Vincent’ was number one all over the world. And it was totally different.
“Then they said, ‘Oh, well, maybe you can do it?’ And then ‘And I Love You So’ got recorded by hundreds of people and then later on ‘Castles in the Air’ and then I had a number one with my version of ‘Crying.’ So eventually they shut their stupid mouths and they began to realize that I know what I’m doing. The records that I have done have lasted because they’re very good records. Let’s not kid ourselves.”
McLean’s résumé backs up the bravado. “Vincent” became a worldwide hit just a year after “American Pie,” “And I Love You So” evolved into a modern standard recorded by hundreds of artists, and his rendition of “Crying” gave him another major international hit in 1980. For an artist routinely dismissed as a one-hit wonder, the evidence tells a different story.
That confidence extends to his recollections of making American Pie, an album whose creation was not without friction. Producer Ed Freeman has previously revealed that McLean’s vocal for the title track was assembled from 24 different takes. McLean rarely phrased his singing exactly the same way twice, leading Freeman to choose his favorite vocals nuances from multiple recordings and comp them into a final track.
“I’m not sure he had to, but he did,” McLean says. “I mean, I guarantee you every vocal I did was very good, but if he had a reason for wanting to do this or that, that’s why I let him be the producer.
“And that wonderful vocal sound that you hear on ‘Vincent,’ it has never been gotten ever since. There’ve been other very good vocal sounds on me, but that was quite an effort. It was a work of art and a work of love.”
McLean once described himself as a fusion artist, blending popular music of an earlier era with folk music and the sounds of early rock and roll.
“That’s absolutely correct that I did describe myself like that,” he says. “I don’t read music. I don’t write music. I just happen to have a very good musical memory for these kinds of songs and as a result I have thousands of them in my head and whatever I do comes through from that.”
Nobody — and I don’t care who it is, the big boys like McCartney or Paul Simon — they cannot touch Irving Berlin and those writers from the 1940s.”
— Don McLean
His musical heroes largely predate rock and roll, and McLean argues that even the greatest songwriters of the modern era can’t match the masters who came before them.
“First of all, nobody — and I don’t care who it is, the big boys like McCartney or Paul Simon — they cannot touch Irving Berlin and those writers from the 1940s; they just can’t,” he says. “They don’t really understand music enough to be able to truly come close to those melodies.
“‘Yesterday’ is a wonderful song, but it can’t touch anything Irving Berlin wrote. It just doesn’t. It’s wonderful and it’s great that McCartney tried to do it and the Beatles are influenced by the same people as I am, except not as much by the American folk scene because they’re not Americans.
“All they had to go on was skiffle and Lonnie Donegan and even then, that was mostly Weavers records, songs that were by Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter that Lonnie Donegan did a terrible job of recording.”
When it comes to songwriting itself, McLean believes one of the hardest skills to master is knowing when an idea has reached its full potential.
“There are ideas that a songwriter may have when writing a song that they might think is big enough to be a title of a song,” he explains. “But it ends up then being just a verse in a new song. So, you have to really fully excavate that thought and that takes weeks of thinking and working until you get to the real idea of what you’re after with the song.
I auctioned off about 20 of them, though. And I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had a few of them back, but I let somebody else have them.”
— Don McLean
“And that comes down to having a certain kind of self-psychology. In other words, to tell yourself, ‘You’re not really saying what you mean. You have to keep working on this as you mean something else.’”
While songwriting remains at the center of his legacy, acoustic guitars have been his constant companions throughout his career. McLean has long favored Martin acoustics and over the years assembled a formidable collection.
“I auctioned off about 20 of them, though,” he says. “And I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had a few of them back, but I let somebody else have them.
“I still probably have about 50 guitars and I use about three or four on the road. They’re really wonderful guitars and there’s nothing else like them. And the great thing is that you can buy an old one from say 10, 20, 30 years ago and get a decent price on it and it will always be the same. There’ll be no cracks or any problems with it because it’s already done all the adjusting that it’s going to do in the environment.”
One of the biggest boosts to McLean’s catalog came in 2000 when Madonna recorded a dance-pop version of “American Pie,” introducing the song to a new generation and delivering a fresh wave of royalties.
“I was happy just for her to do it,” he says today. “Madonna is a very aggressive woman who wants to be in the spotlight all the time. It is probably time for her to pack it in, but you can’t do that with someone like her. She has got so much ambition that it’s almost bigger than her talent.”
McLean’s critics might say the same about him, but he wouldn’t care. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he neatly sidesteps the question: “Oh, I’m going to be remembered, believe me!”
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