Don McLean
Nov. 20th, 2006 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowIt would be unfair to call Don McLean a one-hit wonder. For one thing, he had two hits. For another, he still has some popularity; he still tours, and I've seen him on PBS a couple of times. Nonetheless, the success of American Pie is the defining event of his career; I daresay there are actually more people who know, or know of, that song than who know of the singer. And that's unfair. In an admittedly small effort to redress that, I'm going to talk about some of his other songs under the cut.
It's hard to define exactly where McLean's work falls. His Legendary Songs album includes a cover of the country standard, Your Cheatin' Heart, but it also contains versions of a couple of Buddy Holly's hits, Everyday and Maybe Baby. (That Holly figures in the picture is predictable, given the centrality of Holly's death in American Pie.) There are a couple of other rock'n'roll oldies as well - And I Love You So and Crying - but a lot of the other songs on the album are not easily classifiable.
Vincent, of course, is his best-known song after American Pie (although there are people who know it only as "the Starry Night song"). Has there ever been another popular hit based on the life of a nineteenth-century painter - or on any painter at all? And yet this is a beautiful song, even a love song to a great talent - in the same class, perhaps, as Candle in the Wind, but more refined and evocative.
Empty Chairs is a melancholy song of sorrow at abandonment; it makes an interesting companion piece to Glen Campbell's By the Time I Get to Phoenix. Compare this, from the third verse of Campbell's song:
If I Only Had a Match is a nostalgic piece, but a layered one. The singer gently mocks himself and the milieu he's recreating, but there's an underlying sincerity which belies the mockery as well. The song begins with a spoken bit, as McLean recalls old movies in which the melancholy hero stands under a lamppost at night and begins to sing softly, whereupon three other fellows suddenly appear and join him in four-part harmony. On cue, three other voices join McLean's... It's a remarkably visual song; as McLean sings of a simple dream of life, the corresponding old-movie images come easily to mind. (I suppose it makes a difference how many forties-era movies you've actually seen...)
From its first notes, Wonderful Baby sounds like a sickly-sweet song about cute, chubby little infants, with lyrics like "where babies float by, just counting their toes" and cooing sounds in the background. But closer attention reveals a rather disturbing underlayer; McLean sings cautionary words about people who might deceive the child when it grows, and at one point we hear "the world has gone crazy, I'm glad I'm not you". It's a bit unsettling, actually.
Occasionally, McLean ventures into political commentary; Have You Seen Me is a rather unmelodic screed about boys whose lives are twisted by violence, in Palestine, in the inner city, and elsewhere, and Headroom protests various aspects of modern life. His best work in this area is not on this album, though; it's the wonderfully sardonic Everybody Loves Me, Baby (What's the Matter With You?), a thinly veiled protest against USAn exceptionalism.
There are others of his songs which deserve notice. From the Legendary Songs album, there are the pastoral Winterwood and the weary song of farewell, Castles in the Air. From earlier albums, there is the haunting psalm By the Waters of Babylon and the odd Sister Fatima, which wavers between confidence and pleading, in its attitude towards a fortune-teller's powers. Dreidel is a rather bleak look at life ("You never stop spinning once you leave the cradle / You just slow down"); Jerusalem is a plea for understanding between the three faiths which claim that city as holy.
To think only of American Pie, or even of Vincent as well, is to sell McLean short; he is a versatile and talented artist, and it's a shame how few remember that.
It's hard to define exactly where McLean's work falls. His Legendary Songs album includes a cover of the country standard, Your Cheatin' Heart, but it also contains versions of a couple of Buddy Holly's hits, Everyday and Maybe Baby. (That Holly figures in the picture is predictable, given the centrality of Holly's death in American Pie.) There are a couple of other rock'n'roll oldies as well - And I Love You So and Crying - but a lot of the other songs on the album are not easily classifiable.
Vincent, of course, is his best-known song after American Pie (although there are people who know it only as "the Starry Night song"). Has there ever been another popular hit based on the life of a nineteenth-century painter - or on any painter at all? And yet this is a beautiful song, even a love song to a great talent - in the same class, perhaps, as Candle in the Wind, but more refined and evocative.
Empty Chairs is a melancholy song of sorrow at abandonment; it makes an interesting companion piece to Glen Campbell's By the Time I Get to Phoenix. Compare this, from the third verse of Campbell's song:
And she'll cry just to think I'd really leave herwith the chorus of the McLean song:
Though time and time I've tried to tell her so
She just didn't know
I would really go
And I wonder if you know
That I never understood
That although you said you'd go
Until you left
I never thought you would
If I Only Had a Match is a nostalgic piece, but a layered one. The singer gently mocks himself and the milieu he's recreating, but there's an underlying sincerity which belies the mockery as well. The song begins with a spoken bit, as McLean recalls old movies in which the melancholy hero stands under a lamppost at night and begins to sing softly, whereupon three other fellows suddenly appear and join him in four-part harmony. On cue, three other voices join McLean's... It's a remarkably visual song; as McLean sings of a simple dream of life, the corresponding old-movie images come easily to mind. (I suppose it makes a difference how many forties-era movies you've actually seen...)
From its first notes, Wonderful Baby sounds like a sickly-sweet song about cute, chubby little infants, with lyrics like "where babies float by, just counting their toes" and cooing sounds in the background. But closer attention reveals a rather disturbing underlayer; McLean sings cautionary words about people who might deceive the child when it grows, and at one point we hear "the world has gone crazy, I'm glad I'm not you". It's a bit unsettling, actually.
Occasionally, McLean ventures into political commentary; Have You Seen Me is a rather unmelodic screed about boys whose lives are twisted by violence, in Palestine, in the inner city, and elsewhere, and Headroom protests various aspects of modern life. His best work in this area is not on this album, though; it's the wonderfully sardonic Everybody Loves Me, Baby (What's the Matter With You?), a thinly veiled protest against USAn exceptionalism.
There are others of his songs which deserve notice. From the Legendary Songs album, there are the pastoral Winterwood and the weary song of farewell, Castles in the Air. From earlier albums, there is the haunting psalm By the Waters of Babylon and the odd Sister Fatima, which wavers between confidence and pleading, in its attitude towards a fortune-teller's powers. Dreidel is a rather bleak look at life ("You never stop spinning once you leave the cradle / You just slow down"); Jerusalem is a plea for understanding between the three faiths which claim that city as holy.
To think only of American Pie, or even of Vincent as well, is to sell McLean short; he is a versatile and talented artist, and it's a shame how few remember that.
