This eight-minute epic of a song is also about the decline of mid-century America and the confidence the nation had had in the 1950s and 1960s. McLean, a folk singer whose music inspired the writing of another 1970s classic, ‘ Killing Me Softly’, is reflecting on the end of the high point of rock ‘n’ roll as a cultural force. Another well-known line from the song, ‘this’ll be the day that I die’, is an obvious allusion to Buddy Holly’s own ‘ That’ll Be the Day’, whose chorus culminates with the words ‘that’ll be the day that I die’. However, it may well be a song about the death of one particular kind of music: rock ‘n’ roll. American Pie held the record as the longest song to reach number one for 49 years, not 39 years as an earlier version said the session keyboardist Paul Griffin’s name was misspelled as Griffith. However, even though McLean has gone so far as to say that ‘American Pie’ is not about the death of music as a cultural force.

This issue, of course, depends on whether you subscribe to an ‘intentionalist’ view of literary (or music) analysis or whether you follow Roland Barthes, who in an influential 1960s article argued for the ‘death of the author’, remarking that the real meaning of a literary (and musical, we might add?) work lies ‘not in its origin but in its destination ’. Eliot later said of The Waste Land that it was ‘just a piece of rhythmical grumbling’, and complained that one early critic of his poem had ‘over-understood’ it.Īre we in danger of similarly ‘over-understanding’ McLean’s ‘American Pie’: that is, of overinterpreting its lyrics and finding meanings within them which were not intended by the writer of the song?Īnd from that follows another question: if we do locate meaning within the song which McLean didn’t himself consciously intend, does that mean our interpretation is necessarily wrong? Eliot’s The Waste Land, that landmark work of modernist poetry which has invited a number of different, and often contradictory, interpretations.īoth Eliot and McLean have also famously refused to comment on the ‘true’ meaning or ‘real’ meaning of their best-known works. In their Behind the Song, Michael Heatley and Spencer Leigh call ‘American Pie’ rock music’s equivalent to T.

Who was the song american pie about