Don McLean

Don McLean (born October 2, 1945, New Rochelle, New York) is an American singer-songwriter whose career spans more than five decades. He is best known for the landmark 1971 song "American Pie," one of the most analyzed and celebrated works in the history of popular music.^[1]

McLean grew up in a middle-class family in New Rochelle. Chronic asthma kept him frequently out of school as a child, and he spent much of that time absorbed in the radio, developing an early and deep affection for Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and the first wave of American rock and roll.^[2] At 13, working a morning paper route, he read the news of the February 3, 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson. The shock shaped him for the rest of his life.^[3]

He committed to music at 15, performing his first live set at a New York coffee house at 16. His influences were the American folk tradition as much as rock and roll: Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and the political-narrative songwriting of the Hudson Valley scene drew him in deeply.^[2] He briefly attended Villanova University before transferring to Iona College, but music remained his primary focus.

In the late 1960s McLean became the Hudson River Troubadour for the New York State Council for the Arts, performing at communities along the river and advocating for environmental causes. He sailed on the inaugural voyage of Pete Seeger's Sloop Clearwater, the famous environmental advocacy vessel, performing at ports along the Atlantic seaboard.^[2] These years formed his political sensibility and deepened his connection to the folk tradition that would underpin everything he wrote.

His debut album, Tapestry, was recorded in Berkeley, California in 1969 and released on Mediarts Records in 1970. It earned strong reviews but limited commercial reach. McLean spent the following years being rejected by an estimated 72 record labels before United Artists agreed to release his second album.^[2]

That album, American Pie (1971), produced by Ed Freeman, changed his life and the culture around it. The title track spent four weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and the album reached number one on the Billboard 200. A second song from the record, "Vincent," became his second major hit, a meditation on the inner world of Vincent van Gogh that reached number one in the United Kingdom.^[1]

McLean was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004. He has maintained an active touring career for more than fifty years. In 2015, his handwritten manuscript for "American Pie" sold at Christie's for $1.2 million, and the auction catalog notes he wrote for the occasion remain his most direct public statement about the song's meaning.^[4]