

I mean, today's music is perfect for Trump. "Each year, I think, 'Damn, it's still working, isn't it?' Right up through Trump. "The same group of people that elected Kennedy produced Dylan. It's more about the history of politics and music than the individual characters who shaped that history. "There's a lot of reasons why I don't turn this into a board game. I think I was very clear about that," McLean says. Is "While the King was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown" a reference to Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, as some have suggested? "I don't reference anybody in there other than James Dean by name," he says.

Which also leaves them open to interpretation. To McLean, the words are poetry, beyond analysis.

'Party days are over': Backstreet Boys' AJ McLean reveals how he stays healthy (and sober) on tour The real meaning of 'American Pie' "That was basically the concept and I did it," he says. He also wanted a song about the intersection between politics and music, and how they influence each other. "I could have gone 100 different ways with this," he says. That's all drawn from his memories of the day he learned of Holly's death while folding newspapers one winter day in New Rochelle, New York. The part about how "February made me shiver with every paper I'd deliver/ Bad news on the doorstep/ I couldn't take one more step"? And I just had to figure out where to take it from there." I wrote that first part from 'A long, long time ago' right until 'the day the music died' in one go. "I was casting around for the quintessential American rock ’n’ roll epic I wanted to write," McLean recalls. It was all the inspiration the songwriter needed to fire his imagination. How 'American Pie' became the quintessential American rock ’n’ roll epic

Paul McCartney is 80: So naturally we ranked his 80 best songs The fact that he and Everly were talking 10 years after Holly's death is why the lyrics say, "For 10 years, we've been on our own." That conversation brought the whole thing flooding back for McLean, who was a 13-year-old paperboy when Holly died. But he would have been in the bus all day if he hadn't taken the plane." "He was going to have five or six hours when he got there and be able to get the laundry done," McLean says. "That blew my mind right there," McLean recalls. "I thought, 'What?!' "Īs Everly told the story, Holly even took some other people's dirty laundry on the plane. What Phil Everly told him at Newport, Rhode Island, was that Holly took the plane because he had to do his laundry. This is before we started thinking of the date that plane went down – Feb. 3, 1959 – as "the day the music died."Īt that point, McLean hadn't written those words in "American Pie," his nearly nine-minute epic that's the subject of the new documentary "The Day the Music Died" (streaming now on Paramount+). What Phil Everly told Don McLean about Buddy Holly and the day the music died
