One year later American Pie changed everything. Rejected by countless labels, his first album was released in 1970. Later, he was even offered a business scholarship at Columbia University in New York, but chose to stick to singing in the city's coffee houses. After I finished studying I never looked back, but I did find it a lot of use for reading a contract.' I didn't want any part of working in an office, but I guess it was in my blood. 'After I finished I thought 'Well I did it, Dad. 'I basically did it for my father, who had passed away a couple of years before,' he recalls. When his first sorties seemed to lead nowhere he opted to study for a business degree at night school. Passionate about folk music - singing had originally helped him cope with childhood asthma - McLean hankered after a career as a performer instead. Raised in a conventional middle-class home in a well-to-do part of New York state, he knew that his father hoped that he would follow him down the safe and respectable path of office administration. McLean's own journey into the music business was not exactly straightforward either. A lot of that is reflected in the manuscript.' 'Then I stopped thinking about it for a couple of months, because I couldn't figure out what to do, whether to go in an entirely different direction. And then a little later I had the chorus, and I wanted it to be a fast song.

We may like to think that all great tunes are written in a sudden eureka moment of inspiration, but McLean describes a very different process: 'The first part - the 'long, long time ago' part - came immediately. People will see a song that's not a parlour game, but a song that went in a lot of different directions as I was trying to capture a dream. I never did get involved in talking about it that way because that's not how it was written.

It wasn't something where I was figuring out who was going to be this and what was going to be that. 'When the chance comes to get hold of the catalogue and look at some of the pages, you will see that it didn't come out that way,' he explains. Referring to the endless debate about the song's underlying meaning - its starting point was the singer's teenage memories of the death of Buddy Holly - McLean thinks anyone looking for revelations about 'the day the music died' is likely to end up being disappointed. 'Probably a year or two from now I will also sell a lot of my guitars and the clothes I wore on album covers.'

American pie song meaning