Don McLean: American Pie - 1971


This album remans Don McLean's best-known one, due almost totally to the presence of two titanic songs. 

Firstly, we have American Pie, a song that I fell in love with back in January of 1972 and have loved ever since. Like many, I'm sure, I know every word. Listening to its eight minutes plus again for the first time for a while, I am stuck by just what a great bassline it had, something that had escaped my notice for fifty years. I don't need to talk about the lyrics. They are known so well by now, as indeed are those of McLean's heartbreaking tribute to the tragic Dutch artist Van Gogh in Vincent. The rest of the album still has some good songs, mostly laid-back and gentle, including a couple of Vincent-alikes and an American Pie-alike in the energetic fun of Everybody Loves Me, Baby.

Multifarious Dylan influences abound throughout the album, as do those of Johnny Cash, Paul Simon, Joan Baez, Ralph McTell, coffee house folk, John Denver and numerous protest singers such as Donovan and Barry McGuire. McLean still makes the album his own, though, but we know why, it's down to those two behemoths.

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