Everyone knows the title track, and is probably familiar with Vincent as well. The latter is perhaps more indicative of the other tracks on the album, which are more slow ballads than the jaunty (yet melancholy) American Pie. Hearing more than the usual stuff made me appreciate what a great voice McLean has, really bringing emotion out with songs like Empty Chairs or The Grave.
The album has a theme of loss and
disillusionment, highlighted in the title track where McLean sees the fall of
the American Dream and loss of innocence, illustrated through allusions to popular
music. From the optimism of his youth in the Fifties through to riots and war
in the late Sixties/early Seventies. As with a lot of nostalgia, of course, things were
not always better in the past. The USA may not have been mired in Vietnam, but
it was mired in Korea instead, for example. And talking of which,The Grave
also combines both themes, an anti-war polemic where a weary soldier pulls the
earth over himself to find respite.
Empty Chairs could be about McLean’s
impending divorce, but the “empty clothes on empty chairs” also implies a
bereavement. It’s one of those ambiguous lyrics that makes the song applicable
to anyone who has experienced a loss. Vincent, of course, is about Van Gogh who
was “too beautiful” for the world, and Winterwood likens thoughts to birds
perching on bare trees.
Rounding out the set, the upbeat Everybody
Loves Me, Baby is about how the USA thinks people perceive it as wonderful, versus the truth, as
applicable today as it was then, while Babylon is a short piece based on Psalm
137, performed live as a round, and much more spirtitual than the Boney M
version.
Some tracks are better than others – McLean
really is at his finest with the ballads more than the faster numbers, and it’s
nice to find out that this album wasn’t just the classic single plus a bunch of
filler, to the extent that I’m surprised there weren’t at least three or four tracks that
I’d heard before.
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