"I'm not that smart a guy," Don McLean bluntly informs GRAMMY.com, at the top of a recent interview. (Which is news to this writer, as McLean went on to compellingly expound on everything from George Floyd to the crisis in the Middle East and beyond, for a full hour.)
Rather, "I am a very instinctive person," he contends, over the phone from his home in California's Palm Desert. "I'm a bit of a weirdo in many ways, and the music reflects that."
Surveying his other key songs, McLean says he wrote in "a different style of music for 'Castles in the Air,' and a different style for 'Wonderful Baby,' and a different style for 'Vincent.' Every time, there's a different person in me that comes out."
Indeed, the man we all know for the eight-and-a-half-minute epic "American Pie" — which was nominated for four golden gramophones at the 1973 GRAMMYs — is hardly one-note; his body of work is a kaleidoscope.
Which, naturally, extends to his latest album, American Boys, which dropped May 15. His first album of original material since 2018's Botanical Garden is a cornucopia of subjects, and characters — the "Thunderstorm Girl," the "Stone Cold Gangster," the "Mexicali Gal."
"Instinctive" McLean certainly is, and instinct and inspiration go hand in hand. Here are five inspirations behind American Boys, as stated by the master himself.
America's Rock 'N Roll Innovators
Cleverly looping back to "American Pie," the album's opener, "American Boys," salutes the foundational figures of early rock, who belted "rhythm and blues with a hillbilly soul": Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and "The Fat Man."
If you recall, the far more somber and cryptic "American Pie" grapples with the young deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper in a 1959 plane crash," a tragedy McLean codified as "The Day the Music Died." They truly don't make them like that anymore: what is it about America that produced such game-changing young talent back then?
"I have theories about things. We were a lot closer to the land once," McLean says. "We're living in a very techno, fake, computer-created world now.
"Those boys that I mentioned in that song, whether it was Johnny Cash, or Elvis, or Buddy, or any of them, they were all just one step away from the cotton fields, or the truck they'd be driving," he continues. "They were close to the land, and there's something about the land that produces the music."
Living Out In The Desert
McLean grew up in the Larchmont Woods in New Rochelle, New York — but he eventually picked up sticks and became a desert man.
"I do things for the oddest reasons," McLean says. "But, they're the real reasons, and I can look at myself and say, 'I did what I wanted to do with my life. Nobody told me what to do, ever.'"
What about the desert speaks to him, or flows through this music? It comes back to that sense of authenticity.
"A sense of truth. I must be true," McLean says, in an echo of the American Boys track “Truth and Fame.” "I'm not interested in society, and I'm not interested in what people expect from me. I'm interested in being true to myself, and to my ideas, and that's all."
Or, to put it more bluntly, "I don't give a f— and I never have."
Femme Fatales, Real Or Imagined
Reciting a verse of the swaggery, swampy, bluesy "Stone Gold Gangster," McLean puts on his best tough-guy, '70s-caper voice: "Dressed like a hoodlum princess/ Carrying a .44 gun/ Comes from down south with a filthy mouth/ Done everything that's been done."
"It's about your female hustler, gangster-type person, and it's a very interesting track that we created," McLean says. "I used a lot of sources for that."
The Murder Of George Floyd
On a totally different note, McLean was deeply rattled — as most of us were — by the 2020 murder of George Floyd, one of the pivotal events of our young decade.
Watching the horrible footage, McLean flashed back to his youth, missing swaths of his school year due to chronic asthma that led to pneumonia. He and his mother even had a system: If he couldn't breathe in the middle of the night, he'd bang the floor with a bat to get her.
"I just heard him calling for his mother. I said, 'Nobody is dangerous who's calling for their mother,'" McLean says. "This was a sad little man who didn't have anything, and now he's just reduced to calling for mom. This song just came right out of me."
The Ambience Of His Early Years
McLean is a self-professed "fifties guy," which he admits is a clash with modernity. "I know this is a new America. We have all sorts of new things going on, and we've got to adapt or die. Even as politics and culture, in his estimation, are in the pits.
"We are living in a very medieval time, not an intellectual time now." Music, McLean says, has "only gotten cleaner, and cleaner, and cleaner, and cleaner, and now human hands are not clean enough; our colleges are "going to produce a dumb population that is going to produce dumb music, and it's going to produce dumb leaders."
But he can protest in his own, personal way: in his art, he retrieves a fading America. "I Shall Find My Way" and "Resurrection Man" have an ageless, benedictory heft.
"Marley's Song (Save Yourself)" draws from the film A Christmas Carol — ostensibly the famous 1951 version. "It's about seeing a movie, but the movie is really your life," he's said. And "The Gypsy Road" is "a hobo song, in a way."
Clearly, this American boy knows what made him — and how it all flowed into his winning new album.