The Story Behind The Song: What is Don McLean’s ‘Vincent’ all about?
Before releasing his first album, Tapestry, Don McLean was rejected 72 times by various different labels. It was only when he found Mediarts that it saw the light of day because the label didn’t exist when he was first looking for one that would accept his material. It’s a painful parallel to Vincent van Gogh’s life, which he went on to immortalise on ‘Vincent’. While he’s now rightfully considered one of the most gifted artists of all time, he didn’t live long enough to find an audience that would appreciate the swirling, singular brilliance of the world through his eyes.
Before the release of 1971’s American Pie, McLean had a job playing his guitar in schools. One morning, when the unprecedented success of the album seemed almost implausible, he came across a biography of van Gogh’s life. “Suddenly,” he recalled, “I knew I had to write a song arguing that he wasn’t crazy.” Ahead of producing his own, McLean sat down with van Gogh’s – a print of The Starry Night. With bright blues and yellows, van Gogh conjured a romantic vision of his view from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he was staying in an asylum.
McLean was determined to address van Gogh’s condition without giving into the seductive mythology around his being a tortured artist. “He had an illness, and so did his brother Theo,” he said plainly. “This makes it different, in my mind, to the garden variety of ‘crazy’.” But that is the version clung to most. Van Gogh is rarely imagined simply, without drama, standing with a paintbrush in hand. If he is, subsequent montages of him clutching a razor in the other and taking it to his ear soon follow.
Tackling that tension delicately required McLean to sit with the painting and take in every emotion van Gogh poured into it, scribbling prospective lyrics on a paper bag. The song is restrained and simple, taking all the chaos of van Gogh’s life and creating something tranquil and celebratory. In essence, it mirrored perfectly what the artist did in his work, but even more specifically on The Starry Night.
While in treatment at the asylum, van Gogh wasn’t allowed to go out at night. But he often wrote to his brother Theo about how much he adored the sky, how much more rich colour seemed against the black. In the end, he painted it from memory, using the constraints caused by his illness to create the single most recognisable painting in Western art.
“Starry, starry night,” opens McLean. “Paint your palette blue and gray / Look out on a summer’s day / With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.” As he’d later tell the Telegraph, he did feel a certain kinship with the trouble van Gogh as he wrote the song. “I was in a bad marriage that was torturing me,” he admitted. “I was tortured. I wasn’t as badly off as Vincent was, but I… I wasn’t thrilled, let’s put it that way.” Coopting the visual language of the artist, he also described the world as “unbearably blue” when he battled with grief in his formative years.
It might be his attention to detail when it came to capturing van Gogh’s palette – the amber grain and violet haze – that best highlights how conscientiously he considered the many shades of a much-misunderstood artist. There were incredible lows, but the sole focus was on the triumphs of his career. McLean was able to nod to the chronic rejections he weathered while also making van Gogh’s audience – who laughed at and belittled him, seem like the losing party: “How you suffered for your sanity / And how you tried to set them free / They would not listen, they did not know how / Perhaps they’ll listen now.”
The song was adored by everyone from Tupac Shakur, who loved it so much it was played at his bedside before he died, to George Best, whose funeral it featured in. It’s the defacto soundtrack of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and became a chart hit in the UK and the US. Although it’s perhaps the lesser known of the two, it has an enduring popularity and timelessness parallel to the other hit to come out of the 1971 album, ‘American Pie’. While McLean was never one to overexplain or justify his material, both heavily explored a sense of loss, as he saw it, whether that be the loss of great musicians, an America of old, or a great artist.
“My only anxiety,” Vincent once wrote in a letter to Theo, “Is how can I be of use in the world?” Where he couldn’t see value in his art, McLean did, giving him a posthumous moment of recognition so beautiful it’s devasting. He said Starry Night had the universal ability to make people “glad to be unhappy”. His song, a melancholic but uplifting ode to someone who felt both sides of that coin with fierce intensity, did the same.
