Donald McLean, Jr. (born October 2, 1945,
New Rochelle, New York) is an American singer-songwriter. He is most famous for the 1971 album
American Pie, containing the renowned songs "
American Pie" and "
Vincent".
The McLean clan traces its roots to the
Isle of Mull in the Scottish Hebrides. Both Don's grandfather and father were also named Donald McLean. The Buccis, the family of McLean's mother, Elizabeth, came from
Abruzzi in central
Italy. They left Italy and settled in
Port Chester, New York at the end of the 19th century. He has other extended family in Los Angeles and Boston.
Musical roots
As a young teenager, McLean became interested in
folk music, particularly
the Weavers' 1955 recording
At Carnegie Hall. Childhood asthma meant that McLean missed long periods of school, and although he slipped back in his studies, his love of music was allowed to flourish. He often performed shows for family and friends. By age 16 he had bought his first guitar (a
Harmony acoustic
archtop with a sunburst finish) and begun making contacts in the music business, becoming friends with folk singer
Erik Darling, a member of the Weavers. McLean recorded his first studio sessions (with singer
Lisa Kindred) while still in prep school.
McLean graduated from
Iona Preparatory School in 1963, and briefly attended
Villanova University, dropping out after four months. While at Villanova he became friends with singer/songwriter
Jim Croce.
After leaving Villanova, McLean became associated with famed folk music agent
Harold Leventhal, and for the next six years performed at venues and events including
the Bitter End and
the Gaslight Cafe in New York, the
Newport Folk Festival, the Cellar Door in
Washington, D.C., and
the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Concurrently, McLean attended night school at
Iona College and received a
Bachelors degree in
Business Administration in 1968. He turned down a scholarship to
Columbia University Graduate School in favour of becoming resident singer at
Caffè Lena in
Saratoga Springs, NY.
In 1968, with the help of a grant from the
New York State Council on the Arts, McLean began reaching a wider public, with visits to towns up and down the
Hudson River. He learned the art of performing from his friend and mentor
Pete Seeger. McLean accompanied Seeger on his
Clearwater boat trip up the Hudson River in 1969 to protest environmental pollution in the river. During this time McLean wrote songs that would appear on his first album,
Tapestry. McLean co-edited the book
Songs and Sketches of the First Clearwater Crew with sketches by
Thomas B. Allen for which Pete Seeger wrote the foreword. Seeger and McLean sang "Shenandoah" on the 1974 Clearwater album.
Recording career
Early breakthrough
McLean recorded his first album,
Tapestry, in 1969 in Berkeley, California during the student riots. After being rejected by 34 labels, the album was released by
Mediarts and attracted good reviews but little notice outside the folk community.
McLean's major break came when Mediarts was taken over by
United Artists Records thus securing for his second album,
American Pie, the promotion of a major label. The album spawned two No. 1 hits in the title song and "
Vincent."
American Pie's success made McLean an international star and renewed interest in his first album, which charted more than two years after its initial release.
American Pie
Don McLean's most famous composition, "
American Pie", is a sprawling, impressionistic ballad inspired partly by the deaths of
Buddy Holly,
Ritchie Valens and J. P. Richardson (
The Big Bopper) in a plane crash in 1959. The song would popularize the expression "
The Day the Music Died" in reference to this event. McLean has stated that the lyrics are also somewhat autobiographical and present an abstract story of his life from the mid-1950s until the time he wrote the song in the late 1960s.
The song was recorded on 26 May 1971 and a month later received its first radio airplay on New York’s WNEW-FM and WPLJ-FM to mark the closing of The Fillmore East, a famous New York concert hall. "American Pie" reached number one on the U.S.
Billboard magazine charts for four weeks in 1972, and remains McLean's most successful single release. The single also topped the
Billboard Easy Listening survey. It is also the longest song to reach No. 1 with a running time of 8:36. Some stations played only part one of the original split-sided single release.
29 years later, pop singer
Madonna released a truncated dance-pop
cover version of the song. In response, Don McLean said: "I have received many gifts from God but this is the first time I have ever received a gift from a goddess."
In 2001 "American Pie" was voted No. 5 in a poll of the 365
Songs of the Century compiled by the
Recording Industry Association of America and the
National Endowment for the Arts.
The top five were: "
Over the Rainbow" by
Judy Garland, "
White Christmas" by
Bing Crosby, "
This Land Is Your Land" by
Woody Guthrie, "
Respect" by
Aretha Franklin and "American Pie".
Subsequent recordings
McLean’s third album,
Don McLean, included the song "The Pride Parade" that provides an insight into McLean’s immediate reaction to stardom. McLean told
Melody Maker magazine in 1973 that
Tapestry was an album by someone previously concerned with external situations.
American Pie combines externals with internals and the resultant success of that album makes the third one (
Don McLean) entirely introspective."
The fourth album,
Playin' Favorites was a top-40 hit in the UK in 1973 and included the Irish folk classic, "Mountains of Mourne" and
Buddy Holly’s "
Everyday", a live rendition of which returned McLean to the
UK Singles Chart. McLean said, "The last album (
Don McLean) was a study in depression whereas the new one (
Playin' Favorites) is almost the quintessence of optimism, with a feeling of "Wow, I just woke up from a bad dream."
1977 saw a brief liaison with
Arista Records that yielded the
Prime Time album before, in 1978, McLean’s career changed direction and he started recording in
Nashville with
Elvis Presley’s backing singers,
The Jordanaires, and many of Elvis’s musicians. The result was
Chain Lightning and the international Number 1, "
Crying". The early 1980s saw further chart successes in the US with "
Since I Don’t Have You", a new recording of "Castles in the Air" and "It’s Just the Sun".
In 1987, the release of the country-based
Love Tracks album gave rise to the hit singles "Love in My Heart" (a top-10 in Australia), "Can’t Blame the Wreck on the Train" (US country No. 49), and "Eventually".
In 1991,
EMI reissued the "
American Pie" single in the United Kingdom and McLean performed on
Top of the Pops.
In 1992, previously unreleased songs became available on
Favorites and Rarities while
Don McLean Classics featured new studio recordings of "
Vincent" and "
American Pie".
Don McLean has continued to record new material including
River of Love in 1995 on
Curb Records and, more recently, the albums
You've Got to Share,
Don McLean Sings Marty Robbins and
The Western Album on his own Don McLean Music label.
A new album,
Addicted to Black, was released in May 2009 and is available for purchase at his North American concert performances. It will become available on his website later in 2009. In addition, McLean is expecting to tour in Europe and Australia in 2010.
Other songs
McLean's other well-known songs include:
- "Vincent", a tribute to the 19th century Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh. Although it only reached #12 on the Billboard Hot 100, it proved to be a huge hit worldwide. It was a #1 hit single in the UK Singles Chart. This song was also covered by Josh Groban on his 2001 debut album.
- "Castles in the Air", which McLean recorded twice. His 1981 re-recording was a top-40 hit, reaching #36 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late 1981.
[Whitburn, Joel (2004). The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, 8th Edition (Billboard Publications), page 416.]
- "Wonderful Baby", a tribute to Fred Astaire that Astaire himself recorded. Primarily rejected by pop stations, it reached #1 on the Billboard Easy Listening survey.
- "The Grave", a song that McLean had written about the Vietnam War, was covered by George Michael in 2003 in protest against the Iraq War.
The
American Pie album features a version of
Psalm 137, entitled
Babylon. The song was arranged by McLean and Lee Hays (of The Weavers).
Boney M had a number one hit in the UK with this song in 1978 under the title
Rivers of Babylon, although the two renditions are so different it is not immediately noticeable that they are versions of the same song.
In 1980, McLean had an international number one hit with a cover of the
Roy Orbison classic, "
Crying". It was only after the record became a success overseas that it was it released in the U.S. The single hit #5 on the
Billboard Hot 100 in 1981.
Orbison himself once described McLean as "the voice of the century", and a subsequent re-recording of the song saw Orbison incorporate elements of McLean's version.
Another hit song associated with McLean (though never recorded by him) is "
Killing Me Softly with His Song," which was written
about McLean after
Lori Lieberman, also a singer/songwriter, saw him singing his composition "Empty Chairs" in concert. Afterwards, Lieberman wrote a poem titled "Killing Me Softly with His Blues," which became the basis for the song written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox and recorded by
Roberta Flack (and later covered by
The Fugees).
Concerts
McLean’s subsequent albums did not match the commercial success of
American Pie but he became a major concert attraction in the US and overseas. His repertoire included old concert hall numbers and the catalogues of singers such as
Buddy Holly, and another McLean influence,
Frank Sinatra. The years spent playing gigs in small clubs and coffee houses in the 1960s transformed into well-paced performances. McLean's first concerts at
Carnegie Hall in New York and the
Albert Hall in London in 1972 were critically acclaimed.
In the 1970s, McLean usually toured solo but from 1981 to 1996 was accompanied by
John Platania on guitar. He now tours with his own band of Nashville musicians: Tony Migliore, Jerry Kroon, Ralph Childs and Carl "VIP" Viperman.
In 1997, Don McLean performed "American Pie" with
Garth Brooks at Brooks' free concert in
Central Park in New York City.
CNN reported that "Brooks was joined on stage by two surprise guest stars,
Billy Joel and Don McLean, who brought down the house with an acoustic rendition of 'American Pie'."
Two years later, Brooks repaid the favor by appearing as a special guest (with
Nanci Griffith) on McLean's first American TV special, broadcast as the
PBS special
Starry Starry Night. A month later, McLean wound up the 20th century by performing "American Pie" at the Lincoln Memorial Gala in Washington D.C. Brooks again played "American Pie" during
We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18, 2009.
McLean had a series of conflicts with
Saturday Night Live writer
Andy Breckman, starting when Breckman opened for McLean on tour in 1980. Breckman and McLean have penned competing renditions of the origins of this feud, both of which are available online.
Later work and honors
In 1991, Don McLean returned to the UK top 20 with a re-issue of "American Pie".
Iona College conferred an honorary doctorate on McLean in 2001.
In February 2002, "American Pie" was inducted into the
Grammy Hall of Fame.
In 2004, McLean was inaugurated into the
Songwriters Hall of Fame. Garth Brooks presented the award and said "Don McLean his work, like the man himself is very deep and very compassionate. His pop anthem 'American Pie' is a cultural phenomenon".
In 2007, the biography
The Don McLean Story: Killing Us Softly With His Songs was published. Biographer Alan Howard conducted extensive interviews for this, the only book-length biography of the often reclusive McLean to date.
In 2008, New York City radio station Q104.3 FM
WAXQ named Don McLean's "American Pie" number 37 in their 2008
Top 1,043 Songs Of All Time listener-generated countdown.
Discography
Albums
Compilations
Singles
- The original version of "Castles in the Air" was included on the Tapestry album. In February 1971, it was released as the first single from the album and reached #40 on the Billboard Easy Listening / Adult Contemporary chart. After the success of the "American Pie" single, "Castles in the Air" was included as the B-side to its follow-up, "Vincent", and received enough radio airplay to reach the Hot 100 chart as a "flip". McLean's 1981 version of the song appears on his album, Believers.
Rarities
