This is the day Don McLean refers to as ‘The Day the Music Died.’ The song, then, can be seen as first and foremost a tribute to the musician which the young Don McLean most admired - Buddy Holly. Inside were a few musicians, most notably Buddy Holly. On February 3, 1959, a small plane crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa. So, this is a reference to the thirteen-year-old Don McLean reading about a freak disaster in the newspapers he was delivering.

The lyrics themselves begin with looking back, back into the world of a little boy, remembering how, ‘That music used to make smile.’ That is, until he looked down at the newspaper he was delivering, and not being able to take another step, he read about the widowed bride, and the day the music died. And the soundtrack of my nostalgic sense is American Pie.Īmerican Pie itself is, of course, a song about nostalgia, which in harmony together - my memories and this song - deepens that sentimental quality and transports me back, in a synchronistic fashion (or in Walt Whitman’s miraculous everyday fashion, or in a Proustian, the infused moment of meaning, fashion), into a world I can now only glimpse but fleetingly. There’s nothing specific, just a sense of things as were, a nostalgic sense.

This simple scene epitomises my childhood nostalgia, the world I long to return to, although what that is specifically, what I long for, defies words and logic. A long time ago, in a world so alien to my life as is now, it could almost be unreal. I can picture myself, quite vividly, sitting in the back of our Cherokee, looking out into the dry Texas landscape, as the music played. We’re left needing to piece together the parts for ourselves. I will certainly not be the first to do so since it was first released in 1971, it has enticed many to consider its words, even though Don McLean himself has always been reticent to give us all the definitive meaning.

The enigmatic nature of the lyrics makes ‘American Pie’ a song practically begging to be analysed.

Song meanings american pie