“I was not a part of that whole scene, but Lena saw something in me that she liked, and even though she knew it wasn’t really her bread and butter like all the other acts that played there, she would very quickly not put someone on if she didn’t think they were right for the place.” “I’m not a folky,” he proclaimed to me in 2008.
McLean was a regular at the Caffe before the song hit the big time, but he had an arrogance about his songwriting even then. I remember Lena Spencer of Caffe Lena calling me the week “American Pie” topped the charts to ask me if I thought the caffe might be mobbed for his scheduled appearance that same weekend. It felt new to him, and he was reveling in it. That’s what I do, and purists don’t like me.”īy the time of that interview, McLean was accepted on his own terms. I fuse old-fashioned popular music with rock and roll and folk music. “I have to write songs that are personal, that means something to me. This is why I was turned down by so many record companies because they couldn’t dig “Vincent” and “American Pie” at the same time, and then what is this “Winter Wood” thing and this “Crossroads” thing and this “Empty Chairs?” What is this “Babylon” thing? They’re all different. Of course, now it’s been part of the culture for all these decades. “Nobody liked that song when I first started singing it around, or understood it, or thought it would be anything. I don’t care what I have to do to keep my career going.’ So, all of a sudden, I was a millionaire, and I thought to myself, ‘Gee, this is pretty nice. ‘“American Pie’ was a double-edged sword,” he told me in 2012, “because people who took me seriously as a composer and a singer suddenly saw this song as being too commercial, but it never really bothered me because I didn’t have any money. And for a long time, McLean refused to elaborate on what any of those lyrics meant.
For decades, pop music fans speculated about the meaning of the cryptic “American Pie” lyrics that bemoaned the death of good popular music circa the end of the 1950s.
0 kommentar(er)
