Singer/songwriter Don McLean is celebrating the holidays with his new album Christmas Memories: Remixed & Remastered. It features 12 classics like “Blue Christmas,” “Let It Snow,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, and others. These are songs he recorded years ago, but they didn’t quite shine the way the way he’d hoped. So, he asked producer Mike Severs to do a some Christmas magic and give them new life.
“Mike pulled away a veil of fog that was on the original version of these songs,” McLean says. “He went back and added new instrumentation and repositioned my voice, and it was like going from black and white to color VistaVision or something.”
McLean says for so many of us, these songs bring back wonderful memories of friends, family members, and Christmases gone by.
“I remember as a kid sitting around the record player and listening to music with my family. We all had our favorites, which we played over and over again.”
He wanted to include as many of those “favorites” as possible.
Don McLean’s new album “Christmas Memories: Remixed and Remastered
“I chose ones from different genres. “Let it Snow” and “Christmas Waltz” are a little more jazzy, then some of the other ones like “White Christmas” are right down the middle, Hollywood-type songs. And then there’s “Winter Wonderland,” I’m extremely pleased with that.”
There’s also “Rudolph,” “Silent Night,” and “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”
“Longfellow, the poet, wrote that poem and someone set it to music,” McLean says. “I love that song and I love the way it’s done here. It’s a live performance with just me, Tony Migliori (on piano), and the upright bass.”
McLean’s Christmas album follows a busy two years for the artist, best known for “American Pie,” although he’s had a wave of other hits, as well, like “And I Love You So,” “Vincent,” and more.
Last year, he broke his 50-year silence and sat down to explain the meaning behind the lyrics of his eight-and-half minute epic. It’s all detailed in the documentary The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s American Pie currently streaming on Paramount.
“American Pie” begins with what McLean describes as the end of the happy 50’s with the tragic 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and JD “the Big Bopper” Richardson.
“The story of ‘American Pie’ and those deaths was the beginning of a very troubling time for this country,” McLean says. “Because then you had the assassinations all through the 60s, and the Vietnam War finally ending in the 70s, fifteen years after having us in there, with so many of our friends and neighbors dying.”
The song has resonated with many through the years, including Connie Valens, the little sister of singer/songwriter Ritchie Valens. She traveled to Nashville in October to help induct McLean into the Music City Walk of Fame in Nashville.
“That was really something special,” McLean says. “You know, she appeared in the film. And when I met her, I wanted to know what it was like, what happened.”
McLean learned she was seven years old and, on her way, home when a kid yelled out, “Your brother died.” She ran home and found out about the fatal crash. Ritchie Valens was just 17 at the time, the youngest on the plane. Buddy Holly was only 22.
Valens told the Nashville crowd it was too painful to listen to her brother’s music for many years, but she could listen to “American Pie.”
Connie Valens attends the 2023 Music City Walk of Fame Induction For Don McLean and others in … [+]
When she met McLean for the documentary, she shared what the song has meant through the years to her, and the other families.
“I thanked Don and told him he had immortalized my brother Ritchie, J.P, and Buddy. He’d taken a terrible tragedy and written rock and roll history.”
She said because of McLean, “the music didn’t die.”
Don McLean and Connie Valens at McLean’s Music City Walk of Fame Induction in Nashville, Tennessee – … [+]
“I was very touched,” McLean, when asked what it meant to hear those words. He says he’s always wanted to write songs that resonate with those who hear them, but it’s not an easy thing to do.
“I followed my heart and my muse when I wrote that song and to hear it mattered and was helpful, really moves me. That’s the true power of music. It can be like coming home to a safe place when you hear certain songs.”
McLean continues making music. He has a new album coming out next year called “American Boys.” It’s a collection of songs he describes as “some powerful, some inspirational, a variety of things.” Some are songs he’s written, others he’s co-written with his guitar player, Vip Vipperman.
For now, though, McLean is settling back and celebrating Christmas, and sharing new versions of familiar songs that have become of the American holiday soundtrack.
