Genius and tragedy: Why ‘American Pie’ took Don McLean a decade to write
Many hits over the course of history were penned in a matter of minutes. R.E.M. did it with ‘Losing My Religion’, The Beatles did it with ‘Yesterday’, and Black Sabbath did it with ‘Paranoid’. While those examples are undeniably impressive, many other hits took much longer to curate and still yielded the same amount of praise, if not more. ‘American Pie’ might still be a staple of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s pop-rock, but it took Don McLean a hefty amount of time to write—ten years, to be exact.
The crux of ‘American Pie’ is clear, even though it became densely packed with references to various historical and cultural moments. Released in 1972 and conceptualising “the day the music died”, the song journeys from memorable ’50s moments through to staples of the ’70s, referencing several key figures and events, including Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones.
It also alludes to various societal and political events, including the civil rights movement, the counterculture movement of the ’60s, and the rebellion against capitalist political leadership, all while utilising our association with apple pie and traditional American values. All of this is perfectly set up within the slower, more calculated pace of the initial segment, in which McLean refers to the tragic plane crash that happened in 1959, killing Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson.
Unlike today, Holly’s death shocked the world in a different way, mostly because it was one of the first to occur in the music scene concerning someone of such a young age. McLean not only refers to this event as a tragic demise for music, but he also uses it as a necessary backdrop for all subsequent events; the wistful tone and repeated chorus evoke a longing for a simpler, more hopeful time.
Although the song likely took a while to piece together purely due to its vast number of references, McLean once told American Songwriter that it took around ten years to write and complete because his longing for Holly’s music never subsided. In his words: “It took ten years to write ‘American Pie’ and to put that album together because, throughout those ten years, I was harbouring this yearning, I guess you could say, for Buddy Holly’s music and the sadness over his departure.”
The song was also immensely ambitious, more so than perhaps any other historical-leaning song of the time, especially as it could have been so easy to get any of it wrong. However, the idea of wanting to write a “big song” ended up being the natural glue that pieced everything together in the end. “
We were in the middle of a huge upheaval in the United States: drugs, the war in Vietnam, civil rights, cities on fire, bodies coming home every day from the war in Vietnam,” McLean explained.
He added: “I wanted to write a big song about America, and when I fused the death of Buddy Holly with these ideas, that’s when that song became what it was, but it took ten years for me to wait for that moment to do that.”
Clearly, the song was worth the wait because it remains one of the most culturally important songs to this day, appearing completely inextricable from the eras it pervaded.
