51 Favorites: #15


I’ve had Don McLean’s “American Pie” on the list of things to include in this
series from the start.

Cover to 'American Pie' album with Don McLean's thumb in foreground painted with a star and stripes

Once upon a time, I figured that when I did finally write about the song it would be
in large part to annotate or explicate it. That was before. It was before cyberspace got quite so full; before I realized that with age the mystery and myriad possible interpretations of the lyrics grew more interesting to me than any definitive answers; before McLean slowly began to break his silence on the subject, most recently and distinctly in a documentary that premiered on the Paramount+ service last month called The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s “American Pie”.