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Don McLean Interview
December 2005
Questions posed by fans of Don McLean
Carolyn:
Having toured the UK since the early seventies what do you like most
about our country?
Don: I like the civility of the people, I like the architecture
and I like the countryside.
Carolyn: Do
you have a favourite concert hall and out of all the songs you have
written over the years do you have a particular favourite?
Don: My favourite concert hall is the Royal Festival Hall and
no, I don’t have a favourite song.
Bob Gregg: Which song by any songwriter
do you believe is the best song every written?
Don: I don’t have an answer to that. There are a lot of
candidates for the worst song but I don’t have any particular one
for the best song. There are lots and lots of great songs.
Marie: You obviously love your family
life and I was really impressed at the Hello magazine interview.
With that in mind would you say your music has become less radical?
And, had you been married at the time, would the American Pie lyrics
have been different?
Don: I was married at the time. I have become less radical I
guess over the years but I am rapidly becoming more radical as the
Bush administration remains in power.
Trevor: Have your children inherited
your talents musically?
Don: My children have actually much more and many more talents
than I have and they are better adjusted people than I am/was.
Bill Nisbet:
Your affection for Scotland is well known. Would you consider
singing/recording a Scottish song? Perhaps a Robert Burns song?
Don: Yes I would and we can ask people to suggest a Scottish
song. Maybe I’ll take some suggestions on that on the forum.
Matthias:
Will you ever play a concert in Germany and is it possible to buy
your new CD & DVD in Germany?
Don: I’d be happy to come to Germany again if I was asked. I
have played a number of concerts there. The CD is available for
download from Hyena Records and can be purchased by international
customers from the record company website and from Amazon, etc.
Matthias:
What is the story behind "Three Flights Up"?
Don: Three Flights Up is a concept song. I kind of write songs
with a concept in mind and I remember sitting outside of a dormitory
at a college where I was picking up a girl to go out and there were
three flights to the rooms. The rooms were lit and naturally, being
a young man, I was looking in the windows. There weren’t any people
in them but I was thinking about the stories that may be going on in
the three levels and how they might be connected. I fantasized the
idea of having three different stories going on on three different
levels of a building. But for the purposes of the song, or the
drama, they had to be in some way interconnected. So that’s how that
started.
Harry: I have heard of an earlier
recording or mix of "Castles in the Air", which is different from
the one that appears on your debut LP "Tapestry". I am curious to
know whether the earlier version is available on CD. I love the song
and would love to hear that first mix of it.
Don: No, the earlier version is not available on CD. The entire
[Tapesty] album was remixed when it went out on United Artists so
the original mix of that album and that song, Castles in the Air, as
it was originally done is on the Mediarts label. Ed Freeman remixed
the entire album because I didn’t like the way it sounded. So there
are two mixes of the Tapestry album.
Adam: I've
always been interested in singing and how the singing voice works.
Did you ever need to do specific vocal training to reach all those
high notes in 'Crying' and 'Since I don't have you' etc.?
Don: My voice happened to always be able to sing those types
of songs. I have the ability to do that but I don’t have the
ability to sing, for example, like Bruce Springsteen or Rod Stewart.
That’s just my particular type of voice. Every singer needs training
of some sort if you’re going to preserve your voice. That includes
doing loosening up exercises and involves not trying to sing songs
like Crying and Since I Don’t Have You until near the end of the
show when you’re sure you’ve got all your vocal apparatus in place,
otherwise you’ll hurt yourself and you won’t be able to finish the
show. You can tear a muscle that holds the voice box and you won’t
be able to have any vocal power and you won’t be singing for a
couple of weeks after that at least.
Cora: Will you be coming to Holland for
a concert some day soon? That would be greatly appreciated!
Don: I would love to go to Holland. I’ve not been invited
in many years. I used to go all the time and I like the place very
much. The Dutch promoters turned their backs on me 15 years ago but
the audience is still there.
Gregg: In American Pie, you talk about
the three men you admire most. Are you a devoted Christian? What
are your religious beliefs?
Don: I am not a devoted Christian. I do believe in God. I would
say I’m some sort of a pantheist. I live in the forest and I think
I’m living in church; that’s my God. I do not understand why people
have to believe in something. You’re going to find out what the
truth is one way or another sooner or later and it seems to me that
the requirement that you need to believe in something in this life
is like trying to choose door A or door B – are you going to choose
the door to Heaven or the door to Hell and to me it doesn’t seem
intelligent. I do understand a lot of people get a lot of comfort
from it but it’s not for me.
David: One
of the things that has fascinated me was your business savvy right
from the start. How is it you were able to retain your publishing
even during your first entry level contract with Mediarts?
Don: I would say if anyone wants to go into the music business
the thing you’ve got to do is get a very good transactional lawyer –
a contract lawyer. And it’s got to be a lawyer you know and he is
the person you bring contracts to and he is the person that explains
them to you. Not your manager’s lawyer and not your manager. This
will keep your manager honest and it will allow you to understand in
plain English what it is you’re signing. I guess I get a bit of
credit for having some business savvy but I’ve had a lot of luck. A
lot of things broke right for me and I was able to win a number of
legal actions which allowed me to coalesce my ownership of the songs
that I created but there was a bit of luck involved, so I wasn’t all
that savvy.
Bill: Are there any plans for your
self-released CD's to be available from Amazon, Tower, B&N, etc
anytime soon??
Don: Yes, at some point the self-released CDs will be available
somewhere, I don’t know when yet. They are currently available on
the Internet at americanpie.com and are sold at my shows.
Pete: Don, if you could go back to 1971
and start again, would you do anything differently?
Don: No I wouldn’t because I’m happy with where I am now. Only
if you’re unhappy with where you are in life do you want to change
direction or do something different.
Willie: In
what way do you write down your guitar music? In notes, in a tab, or
simply with symbols AM(inor) Gmaj7 etc? Or do you remember
everything you composed by heart?
Don: I write symbols down like A minor, G major 7th
or whatever. I write the lyric down and over the top I throw the
guitar chord symbols and try to remember the melody or have the
melody already sung into a tape recorder. I’ll go through it a few
times and will change things till I get it right.
Janet: I love your song 'Sea Man'. I
would love to know where you got the idea from, although I could
make an educated guess. I would dearly love the lyrics to this song
to use with my teaching, since it seems so appropriate in light of
recent disasters and tragedies in the world today.
Don: The lyrics can be obtained from the Believers album which
is available internationally on Hip-o Records. The song is actually
a true story of a man who lived by the sea in Heifer, Israel. It’s
all true and everything in the song is what he told me about his
life. He even lives in a house shaped like a fish.
Mary: Don, on reaching 60 on 11th
December, I intend to continue my battle as a recycled teenager in
growing old disgracefully and have purchased a bright purple
bicycle. How about you? Can we change attitudes to our elders - will
our generation continue to make a difference?
Don: I think our generation made a difference to our generation.
I think other people’s generations make a difference to their generation. I don’t think they pay too much attention to us unless
they’re open minded about different time periods and they want to
transplant themselves into the 40s or 50s or 70s or 80s, which I
liked to do when I was young but I don’t find a lot of young people
who are interested in that. They’re mostly interested in making sure
that they’re caught up with everything that is current and being
interested in the past is not something they’re interested in.
Tony: I have often wondered if Headroom
was really your first, albeit subtle, Rearview Mirror?
Don: No, I would say that’s not true. It’s a totally unique
album with all new songs on it. Rearview Mirror is a compilation
with a lot of the things I’ve done. The only thing that is really
new is Run Diana Run. Of course, there are many new versions that
were unearthed in the process of going through everything that I
have here at the house. So that, and the DVD part, makes it
interesting.
Tony: A
few years ago I had the pleasure of hearing you sing a new song
about ‘Eisenhower’. You explained that you had written it for a
friend of yours, who was producing a Broadway musical. Did that show
ever get off the ground? Have you recorded it, and would you ever
consider writing a complete musical score for Broadway and follow in
the footsteps of some of those great songwriters of the past?
Don: No, the musical never got off the ground. I will be
recording the song and it will be on the Addicted to Black album. If
I were asked and people had the money to do the show I would
consider writing a musical score. But it costs enormous sums of
money to do a Broadway show, something like several hundred thousand
dollars a week, so backers don’t take a chance on someone like Don
McLean. They take a chance on Paul Simon or on someone like that.
Paul Simon had the worst black eye in the world from the one he
tried to do, so I don’t think it’s a place where a lot of
songwriters want to have their music portrayed and I don’t think
that it’s a comfortable place for people to invest.
Tony: In
the song book, ‘The songs of Don McLean’ there are words and music
included for two songs. ‘I Want Her’, and ‘I Couldn’t Keep It To
Myself’. In all the 30 years that I’ve seen you perform, I have
never heard these two songs, although I know ‘I Want Her’ is
included in the ‘Til Tomorrow’ footage. Did you ever record them in
the early days, (someone must have heard them to transcribe them for
this book) and perhaps you could even release them as true
‘rarities’ some day, along with Lonely As the Night and Slow and
Easy?
Don: ‘I Couldn’t Keep It To Myself’ is a song that a young girl
sang who was involved with the Hudson River Sloop. She came up with
it and sang it so I put it in the songbook as a traditional song. I
never did it but it is a cool little song. ‘I Want Her’ is a song
that I wrote. It was supposed to be on the Tapestry album but it
only ended up in the Bob Elfstrom movie, Till Tomorrow, never
any place else. I don’t think they will ever be released but it’s
possible, though I’ve got other things I want to do.
Tony: What
are the origins of the name ‘Benny Bird’?
Don: It’s just a silly name I made up in the 70s.
Leah: Who does your favorite cover of
American Pie?
Don: Madonna, by a long shot.
Erik: When you were on the Clearwater
with Pete Seeger, were there any songs you learned that may have
influenced your own songs in any way? I'm curious as a fellow
songwriter.
Don: I think one of the reasons why the songs I wrote in that
period were so good (let’s say compared to other songs) was that I
was around so many interesting creative people who were writing
songs and who were singing songs and who were coming up with new
songs all the time. Definitely the environment I was in was very
inspiring. I could never have written a song like Tapestry today and
I couldn’t do it then if I hadn’t been around that environment.
Alan Young: I have all your albums and
the one that I keep playing is "Don McLean sings Marty Robbins". I
see that apart from singing and playing, you did the arrangements
and also produced the album. Can you give an insight into how you
arrange the songs? I think it can make such a difference to a song.
Do you find it very challenging? And how difficult is it to produce
your own album?
Don: We’re not going to get into the covering thing but, for
example, Sittin in the Balcony is a cover recording that I did and
Don’t is a cover because I did it exactly like Elvis’ recording.
Sittin in the Balcony is an attempt to do it like the Eddie Cochran
version, so it’s a cover type song. But if you look at my versions
of any of the songs on the Don McLean Sings Marty Robbins album
there I have gone to the sheet music immediately and started with
the song as if I’ve never heard anyone else’s version of it. You
might want to use any number of devices to create an arrangement –
that has to do with an individual artist’s creativity. But you clear
your mind of any other version you’ve heard of the song and start
with the sheet music.
It is not hard to produce your own record if you have really good
musicians, a really good arranger and a really good engineer because
the engineer does most of the work. He is the one who gets the
sound. The musicians play their part and of course you’re there all
the time making sure that the feel of the track is how you want it.
Then with the engineer you create the mix you want but you’re not
mixing it, he is. That goes for every producer. They always rely on
their engineer and so the engineer is as important as the producer.
Fuzzy: I remember your mentioning some
time in the last couple of years that you were reading a lot of
books on native Americans. In your Cerritos concert in March this
year, I heard your new song "The Three of Us", about an American
Indian family. Will this song appear in your upcoming album of
originals? Also, have you written other songs about American
Indians that we are likely to hear soon?
Don: The Three of Us is not about an American Indian family.
It is about me and my parents. But it is in part going back to the
land we lived on which was once Indian land. It uses the notion of
words and how words can out last anything as a sub-theme to talk
about the fact that my parents are dead and that basically I’m
fading as I get older. So that’s what that song is about. I’ve never
written any song about American Indians as such but I am very
interested in them. That song at least refers to the Indians and
their influence in America.
10 Years On...
This Don McLean fan interview was arranged by way of thanks for
the support given to the site over the past 10 years. Initially
started in November 1995 as the ‘Don McLean UK Home Page and World
Wide Fan Site’, it became the Official Website of Don McLean and
American Pie three years ago. Throughout its history as a fan site
and then official site, the real people who are the fans of Don
McLean have been at its heart.
It has been great to see so many other related
sites appear in recent years, all adding something unique to the Don
McLean fan community. Phil Carlyle brilliantly presented the Words
and Music of Don McLean and it was an honour to be able to integrate
his work within the official site where Phil together with Ron Buck
and Jim Monaghan continue to provide information, lyrics and tabs
for guitar enthusiasts.
I’d especially like to recognise Bob Gregg and
his Australian site, which was the original official home page. Bob
has done more than just about anyone to promote the music of Don
McLean around the world. I am very grateful for all the support he
has given me since 1995.
Alan Howard
Producer. The Official Website of Don McLean
and American Pie.
http://www.don-mclean.com/
http://www.americanpie.com/
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