America’s Favorite Pastime: Dissecting“American Pie”

I met a girl who sang the blues

And I asked her for some happy news

But she just smiled and turned away

There are very few people who aren’t at least casually acquainted with American Pie, Don McLean’s mega-hit that topped the Billboard chart on January 15, 1972, for a four-week stay. It was the Gone with the Wind of Pop songs, clocking in at an epic 8 minutes and 38 seconds, so some radio stations only played the first half of the song upon its initial release.

As American Pie became enormously popular, program directors found a way to work the longest-song-ever into their playlists (even the Beatles “Hey Jude” only ran a little over seven minutes.) Music fans had, and still have, a ball deciphering its cryptic, Dylanesque lyrics. American Pie was parsed for meaning as much as any Beatles song. Entire radio programs were dedicated to debating the song’s deeper symbolism.

Don McLean has always openly admitted that the inspiration for “American Pie” was his boyhood worship of Buddy Holly. The impetus for the song came from the headlines of the fatal plane crash that killed Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper on February 3, 1959. McLean was a young paperboy at the time, and re-reading the news over and over while preparing his papers for delivery was traumatic.

But February made me shiver

With every paper I’d deliver

Bad news on the doorstep

I couldn’t take one more step

Buddy’s tragic death had a profound and lasting effect on McLean. Don saw Holly as much more than a rock and roll star. “He was a symbol of something deeper than the music,” McLean said. Twelve years after Holly’s untimely demise, McLean finally “exorcised his long-running grief over Holly’s death.”

McLean also said of “American Pie”: “I’m very proud of the song. It is biographical in nature. I don’t think anyone has ever picked up on that. The song was about Buddy Holly. But it moves on to describe America as I was seeing it and how I was fantasizing it might become, so it’s part reality and part fantasy. I’ve never analyzed the lyrics to the song. They’re beyond analysis. They’re poetry.”

In the early 1990s, Casey Kasem claimed that Don McLean provided interpretations of the lyrics to “American Pie” during an interview. Kasem naturally shared this supposed Holy Writ on his radio program. McLean called BS though, insisting that he never spoke to Kasem and that McLean never shared any of the references Kasem claims he did.

Mclean wrote:

You will find many “interpretations” of my lyrics but none of them by me.

Isn’t this fun?

Sorry to leave you all on your own like this but long ago I

realized that songwriters should make their statements and move

on, maintaining a dignified silence.

McLean’s right. Interpreting the lyrics to American Pie is fun. People have been doing it consistently for almost 50 years. We can only hope that what we come up with is fun for Don too.

For example — how could anyone interpret “moss grows fat on a Rolling Stone” as Mick Jagger carrying a few extra pounds? You’d have to prove there was a time when the eternally tiny Jagger was ever anything but a bone-rack … but that’s what makes the game fun.

“American Pie” is, and will remain, an enduring classic. In the decades since its release, it’s become part of our shared cultural heritage. Music fans will always dissect the lyrics looking for clues, so American Pie is a great past-time as well as a great song.