Don McLean Quotes
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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.
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American Pie speaks to the loss that we feel. That's why that song has found the niche that it has.
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Starry, starry night, flaming flowers that brightly blaze, swirling clouds in violet haze reflect Vincent's eyes of china blue.
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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.
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We live in a world of empty spectacle, the world of spectacle rock, songs you can't remember, it's all about the expression of money, power and kind of empty and fascistic. Where technology has changed society, where people are not using their brains as much, not seeing the bigger picture but constantly looking down at the cellphone and not seeing the bigger picture. Today's songwriter need to be on outside, find their own trip if you will and find a way to connect from a place that no one has heard before. It might be taken as weird but that is what makes it unique.
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I met a girl who sang the blues and I asked her for some happy news, but she just smiled and turned away. And the three men I admire most, The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, They caught the last train to the coast The day the music died.
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My parents were not musical, and they were not effervescent people; everything was very quiet. The music that I played was loud; it used to drive them up the wall. My father died, and that was a tragedy for everybody, but suddenly I didn't have anybody to stop me from doing what I wanted to do.
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Each thread of life that you leave, will spin around your deeds and dictate your needs.
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Work my hands in the soil, what's the pay for all the toil? Dust for blood, dust for blood, dust for blood.
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Not a word was spoken. The church bells all were broken.
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Do you recall what was revealed the day the music died?
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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.
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Bad news on the doorstep;I couldn’t take one more step
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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.
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Before the Beatles, America was musically a very conservative country. You can see film footage of people at a baseball game, they all had hats and ties on, and the women were dressed up like they were going to church. That was the America that I started getting interested in musically.
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That song didn't just happen. It grew out of my experiences. 'American Pie' was part of my process of self-awakening: a mystical trip into my past.
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I think longevity is more important than trying to make people realize you're around every second.
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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.
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In the autumn of 1970 I had a job singing in the school system, playing my guitar in classrooms.
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And as the players tried to take the field, the Marching Band refused to yield.
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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.
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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.
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When people ask what 'American Pie' is about, they're missing the point. The song isn't about the lines themselves - it's about what is between the lines. The song is about what isn't there.
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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.