'I could have gone 100 different ways with this,' he says. That's all drawn from his memories of the day he learned of Holly's death while folding newspapers one winter day in New Rochelle, New York. The part about how 'February made me shiver with every paper I'd deliver/ Bad news on the doorstep/ I couldn't take one more step'? And I just had to figure out where to take it from there.' I wrote that first part from 'A long, long time ago' right until 'the day the music died' in one go. 'I was casting around for the quintessential American rock ’n’ roll epic I wanted to write,' McLean recalls. It was all the inspiration the songwriter needed to fire his imagination. How 'American Pie' became the quintessential American rock ’n’ roll epic Paul McCartney is 80: So naturally we ranked his 80 best songs The fact that he and Everly were talking 10 years after Holly's death is why the lyrics say, 'For 10 years, we've been on our own.' That conversation brought the whole thing flooding back for McLean, who was a 13-year-old paperboy when Holly died.

But he would have been in the bus all day if he hadn't taken the plane.' 'He was going to have five or six hours when he got there and be able to get the laundry done,' McLean says. 'That blew my mind right there,' McLean recalls. 'I thought, 'What?!' 'Īs Everly told the story, Holly even took some other people's dirty laundry on the plane. What Phil Everly told him at Newport, Rhode Island, was that Holly took the plane because he had to do his laundry. This is before we started thinking of the date that plane went down – Feb. 3, 1959 – as 'the day the music died.'Īt that point, McLean hadn't written those words in 'American Pie,' his nearly nine-minute epic that's the subject of the new documentary 'The Day the Music Died' (streaming now on Paramount+).

What Phil Everly told Don McLean about Buddy Holly and the day the music died

Meaning of the song american pie