Don McLean

I got my first guitar when I was 16. I'd play for my family and friends, but taking that guitar out there into the wide, wide world wasn't something I ever thought about.

People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.

When I go on the road now, which is less than before, but still more than I'd like to, I think of myself primarily as a singer. Not a songwriter, not a celebrity, just a man who likes to sing.

I was always just into my music and maybe into trying to save the world a little bit. I never really thought I'd have a hit record or anything like that. I was prepared to travel around all over the country, kind of like a Johnny Appleseed, and sing.

There's always a fundamental misery that's with me that I always relate to some bit of loss or something. I don't know what it is about me, but even though I'm happy on the surface, there's something there, I guess. So, it all comes from wherever it comes from. I really don't know where that is.

I have a weird sense sometimes of what's going to happen before it happens, and I kind of live by that, which is how my instincts operate, I suppose.

In the autumn of 1970 I had a job singing in the school system, playing my guitar in classrooms.

American Pie speaks to the loss that we feel. That's why that song has found the niche that it has.

I'm glad that my music has helped other people as it's helped me. It makes me glad that I did what I did with my life.

I was around in 1970, and now I am around in 2015 ... there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'

Over the years I've had more and more of an association with Nashville.

We all got up to dance. Oh but we never got the chance

I mean, I've been given a terrific life by the audiences who stuck with me all over the world.

Basically, in 'American Pie,' things are heading in the wrong direction. It is becoming less ideal, less idyllic. I don't know whether you consider that wrong or right, but it is a morality song in a sense.

And as the players tried to take the field, the Marching Band refused to yield.

I just started playing guitar and started singing and started working on this act that I would call 'Don McLean' when I was probably in high school.

The kids today all seem to think they should be stars, but I wasn't brought up that way.

But I knew - in the old days, if a song was a good song, I don't care if it was 'Yellow Submarine' or, you know, or 'The Times They Are a-Changin' or 'Don't Be Cruel', you knew it, you know? You heard that song, and you were talking about it, and you knew it.

In the streets the children screamed. The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed

I had asthma when I was a kid, asthma so bad that it would turn into pneumonia and I almost died several times. Nobody knew why back then, but now it's obvious.

I actually feel I'm in a much better place than I've ever been because I'm thankful people still love the songs that I've written, and they seem to like me. And they come to the shows in droves, and they get all excited, and I can still hit all the notes, and I don't look terrible.

Every thread of creation is held in position by still other strands of things living.

I developed this fantasy world. I found that that was much more fun and more interesting and exciting than real life was to me. Then, once I got the guitar going when I was a teenager, I set sail for the direction I've been in my whole life.

In a sense, 'American Pie' was a very despairing song but it can also be seen as very hopeful.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

I think longevity is more important than trying to make people realize you're around every second.

I don't relate to what's left of the music business. There doesn't seem to be any point to it anymore. The business that I grew up in and loved, we made records a different way - there were record companies, there were stores where you could buy albums.

I am what I do, and that's partly why I don't want to give up singing. But when I can't sing well, I will.

If something comes up I might write about it, but without an outlet the whole thing winds down.