SPILL FEATURE: I’M STILL DOING MY THING – A CONVERSATION WITH DON McLEAN

I’M STILL DOING MY THING

A CONVERSATION WITH DON McLEAN

“I’ve got a lot of albums, a lot of songs, a lot of appearances, because I only did one thing: exactly what it is that I’m doing. I never got diverted away into anything else. I only had one standard, which is: when I had something to say, I would write a song.”

To say that Don McLean has had a storied career would truly be an understatement. With a professional life that reaches back over fifty years, and whose highlights include writing the iconic “American Pie” and “Vincent (Starry Starry Night)”, McLean has made an indelible mark on the world of music. His statement above is significant, as it truly reflects his life and his work ethic. At age 78, McLean continues to write, record and tour. He was at the vanguard of the singer-songwriter era of the early 1970s with his first album, Tapestry (1970), and continues that trend with his soon-to-be-released album American Boys, coming out in Feb. 2024. The purpose for our chat centred around the release of a holiday collection, Christmas Memories: Remixed and Remastered. However, one discovers, when talking with Don McLean, that the conversation topics can be wide-ranging.

The ‘new’ release, Christmas Memories: Remixed and Remastered is actually a compilation of songs which had appeared on McLean’s previous holiday releases, Christmas (1991), and Christmas Dreams (1997). Explaining the logic behind re-releasing these songs, McLean refers to his relationship with Nashville producer Mike Severs. “I made a few albums with Mike. We made Addicted To Black, Still Playin’ Favorites, we made Botanical Gardens, and we have a new album called American Boys, coming out in February. I can do anything with him, and I have these little loose ends that I’ve always wanted to fix. Coming around Christmas, I said, ‘You know, in that version of ‘White Christmas’? I cannot stand the bass on that thing!’. There are several other tracks where I do not like the bass. I said, “Can we do ‘White Christmas’, and get Jim Ferguson?’, who is a great upright bass player. And we overdubbed and changed the whole thing. We have a whole EQ on my voice that is twice the size it used to be. And he did it! He came back first with ‘White Christmas’. It blew my mind! I thought, ‘Man! So beautiful!’ It was just magic. I wanted to try ‘Winter Wonderland’ and get it to really swing. I worked with him on the phone, and said, ‘I want it to swing here, do this and that’. We worked on one song after another, until I had four of them. I said, ‘Oh, man, we’ve got to put an album out!’ It just happened. It’s like they’re new songs!”

On the topic of why he chose certain songs and not others for his recent Christmas release, McLean says, “I hear everything in my head, so I could hear how these would all go together. I’m going to do a ‘Volume Two’ of the ones that are remaining. All 24 of these are going to be out. Next year on the album, I’ll have a green shirt instead of a red shirt! (laughs).”

McLean goes into great detail about recording techniques and the sonic scope of recorded music, explaining that the dynamics of his remixed Christmas songs are greatly improved. He goes on to say, “The main thing is the focus of my voice. My voice was always too far down in those other tracks. Now it’s in front of you, where it’s supposed to be. It’s big. We have a way of getting what we call ‘chamber echo’ on my voice. If you listen to the old albums from Capitol Records and Columbia Records, they had a ‘chamber’ sound. There actually were chambers under the ground, big long tunnels. They would put a track in there and play it and get this huge echo, and they would record that, and that would be the sound you heard, with the track in the actual physical chamber being played through a speaker. Later on, you had a sound like Sun Records, which was a dirty old, clapped out, cheap sound. That would sometimes get mixed with the chamber sound, and you’d have a cool sound. The guys were always fiddling around with EQs. We had got to the point where we had an EQ on my voice that was dynamite! We have that on every one of those tracks.”

While speaking about recording techniques on old records, the conversation turns to his personal musical influences, and McLean speaks at length about his hero, Frank Sinatra. “Everything Frank did was a hit. Frank had the most amazing ears of anybody that ever lived. He just had pages and pages and pages of gorgeous records and beautiful songs that he made his own with his monster talent. We were so lucky to have people like this walking around.” This comment comes from a man who did his share of influencing, when it was his turn on the wheel. The impact of his 1971 album American Pie, and the singles that it spawned, continues to this day. Speaking about his work and why he does what he does, the artist observes, “I don’t have anything else in my DNA. I don’t play chess, I don’t fly a plane… there’s only one thing that I do: I write songs, I sing songs, I do personal appearances, and I have sounds in my head. That’s all I do. I don’t care about anything else, and I only care about what I care about. I’m not interested in telling some Rolling Stone writer that I’m interested in some rap group, or some group that I really don’t give a rat’s ass about, ’cause I want to make him think that I’m ‘with it’. I am NOT ‘with it’, alright? I want to make sure that is clear!! I’m ‘UN-with it’!

McLean continues to buck trends and be ‘un-with it’. While he began his career as a folk style acoustic guitar and banjo-playing songwriter, he was always interested in musical diversity, and in stretching his skills. This interest in varied genres is evident on Christmas Memories: Remixed and Remastered. Addressing musical styles, he states, “Well, I’m as much a folkie as Bob Dylan is. We both started doing that. Why? Because you could make a living with a guitar. I love folk melodies. But we all branched out and became recording artists. I have a pop/jazz thing. You can hear that on ‘Christmas Waltz’, or ‘Let It Snow’. We’ve got guys who play with me, and they are way up there. They are not just garden-variety sidemen. These guys have been with me 30, 40 years, and they are phenomenal musicians. I don’t work with those other kinds of people. I would rather be by myself, and I did that for twenty years. I was a soloist. You can see me playing on YouTube in front of seven or eight thousand people, at Royal Albert Hall, by myself, with guitar and banjo.”

Our conversation shifts to talk of new music, specifically, his upcoming album of original songs. Stressing that he does not write unless he is strongly motivated, McLean speaks of a gentle nudge he received from his guitarist, Vip Vipperman. McLean relates, “I didn’t want to write songs. I was going through this terrible divorce, and all this stuff was happening. I wasn’t writing anything and didn’t want to. I didn’t know what was even going to happen with me. Vip said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a song here. Do you want to try to fool around with it? It was completely different from ‘American Boys’, but I took it. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll have something to do.’ But I couldn’t do a thing with it. I got three or four more from him, and I couldn’t do anything with them. Four years went by! I woke up one day and said, ‘I know what to do with this!’ So, I turned the tape recorder on, and I had it! It was a real simple thing… I had to straighten a lot of things out. I worked really hard. But the songs were always hanging around. Hanging around! I said, ‘Well, I’m gonna do this.’ And then I wrote six more songs myself, and we ended up with a dozen songs. I’ve never written with anyone before in my life, and I never will again, because I just don’t do it. But Vip is my dear friend, and he really helped me. I was suddenly busy with a project.”

One of the songs that the creative spark led him to write was “The Ballad of George Floyd”, from McLean’s upcoming album. McLean was deeply struck by the fact that Floyd was calling for his mother when he died.

“You remember when you call for your mother
And things are almost done
Remember when you call for your mother
And your race is almost run.
Yeah, he called for his mother
With those people all standin’ around
He told those men he could not breathe
So they put him in the ground.”

“This is an American tragedy. These are bad actors in the police force. Tyre Nichols, a young man, 29 years old.’” Nichols was tragically beaten to death by five black police officers in January of 2023. “It’s an American story. We’re Americans! That’s on that record. Yeah, so, I’m still doing my thing.”

McLean continues, going on to talk about the contradictions present in American life, today, and in the past. Of his own experiences, he observes, “I believe, firmly, that we were brought up in an era of Christian morality. The church worked. Television – you had your cowboy stars telling you to be good to animals, and nice to old people, and always to be honest and faithful, and true. And then we got lied to about that Vietnam War, and then we got our President’s head blown off. I think that sent America down a rabbit hole it never has come out of – and that’s in ‘American Pie’. That’s there. All those killings, all that insanity: that’s what I was going for. Not just ‘America the Beautiful’. We’ve never came back from that, and I think that we’re still seeing the government hide information about this, which is prima facie proof that they are involved with it, ’cause they’re still hiding shit! Why?!?”

At 78, Don McLean continues to walk the path he started on all those years ago, using tried and true practices to make his art. On creativity and his life’s work, he concludes by saying, “It’s all there in the subconscious of my little mind. I have no idea what I’m doing. Stuff comes out of me, and it comes out of me when it’s ready to come out. I’m not interested in trying to sound like anybody else, or write like anybody else, or be anybody else. That’s the one thing that I’m proudest of, as an old man. I can look in the mirror and say, ‘Goddammit, I did it my way.’”

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