Don McLean doesn’t need to make another record. He doesn’t even need to take another interview. The man could live out his days on “American Pie” residuals and the occasional “Vincent” revival every time Hollywood remembers Van Gogh existed. But in 2018, there he was, on the phone, talking about Botanical Gardens, an album that proved the folk troubadour still likes to throw curveballs at anyone who thinks they’ve got him pegged.
“It’s all what I do, you know—kind of mixed up,” he told me, almost shrugging through the receiver. Blues, old-time rock & roll, country, theatrical melancholy—it’s all crammed into the record. “I don’t think I’ve ever really been properly analyzed,” he admitted. Not bitter, just bemused. The guy wrote “Vincent,” but he still has to remind people that he doesn’t just live in folk land.
McLean singled out “When July Comes” as a centerpiece. “It’s one of those songs that gets under your skin,” he said. The song’s melancholy flair didn’t just arrive out of nowhere—it hung around in his head until he finally gave in. “Some ideas don’t give up on you. They just keep coming back until you write them down.”
That persistence also applied to “Total Eclipse of the Sun,” a song decades in the making, based on a memory from 1963. “I didn’t want to think about that weekend for the rest of my life,” he said, “but it kept coming back in my head.” If the muse nags long enough, McLean eventually caves.
Botanical Gardens itself stemmed from literal strolls through Sydney’s Royal Botanic Gardens, right next to the Opera House. “I love nature. I’m a bit of a pantheist—I find God everywhere in nature and not in church,” he said. “That whole idea just developed in my head.” For McLean, the title track isn’t just a garden. It’s a metaphorical heaven, a Shangri-La, an afterlife.
Of course, the conversation veered back to politics. This is Don McLean, after all. “Back in the day, anti-war songs were about our friends being killed in Vietnam,” he said, contrasting that with today’s hashtags. “If I wrote something political now, it’d be about police brutality. That would matter more than some of this other stuff.” He said it flat, not as a provocation but as a man who still thinks songs should last longer than a news cycle.
And then there’s “Vincent.” Like clockwork, whenever a Van Gogh biopic drops, the song blows up again. In 2018, James Blake and Ellie Goulding both covered it, while the original manuscript sat on display at the Country Music Hall of Fame. McLean laughed at the idea that people keep rediscovering it. “I did the right thing there,” he said. “It carved out a person and an artistic niche. People come back to it once in a while.”
He’s grateful, if still slightly amazed, that the songs haven’t abandoned him. “I never know if I’m going to do it again,” he said. “I don’t think anybody should be so confident. Plenty of people had a nice few moments and then never did a damn thing again. I’ve been lucky.”
Lucky, sure—but also persistent. McLean even chuckled about “Killing Me Softly,” the Roberta Flack classic famously inspired by Lori Lieberman watching him sing “Empty Chairs.” “That came out of me playing The Troubadour. Laurie came to the show, wrote a poem, and the guys she worked with turned it into a song,” he said. “That’s just a cool thing to happen.” He sounded more amused than proud, as if to say: even his ripple effects have ripple effects.
For McLean, it was never about money, never about volume. “I got into this to do something beautiful,” he said. Decades later, walking through gardens and still pulling melodies out of thin air, he’s doing exactly that.
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the video below.
