As it goes, I’m with Rosie in bracketing this in my mind with Without You, and when I found the album in a Purley jumble sale circa 1980 I loved it almost unconditionally. There is a warm, thundercloud of reverb all over it, giving Sister Fatima and Til Tomorrow an oppressive beauty that reminds me of the atmosphere of Scott 3. An unusual and quite adventurous sound for ‘72 when you set it against the dead, carpeted sound of Tapestry or Heart Of Gold.

The flip of Vincent was the divine Castles In The Air, with cowardly hick Don leaving his high-class girl but asking someone else to deliver the message: “I know I’m weak, but I can’t face that girl again”. Tom, I know the quality of a flip doesn’t alter the score but give it a try, “pur-leeease” (as the Stargazers said on their very own single-pointer).

Fwiw, from 1968 to 1972 pretty much all my rock heroes and faves were getting worse, including the ones who then overdosed. Dylan was the most obvious, but also Lou Reed, the Kinks, the Airplane, the Stones, the Beatles, the Who (though “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” were a lot more touching than “American Pie” as laments of the condition), the Byrds and on and on. Would’ve helped if I hadn’t underrated Zeppelin and Deep Purple and Sabbath and had been paying more than cursory attention to the Temptations and Funkadelic and Kool & the Gang, etc. and if I’d heard the Stooges and Slade and the MC5 and T. Rex (not to mention the Beginning Of The End and Chakachas and Manu Dibangu and U. Roy, assuming I’d have known enough to appreciate them, which is questionable). But the great Sixties rockers did seem to be crapping out en masse, to be replaced by godawful soft rock and country rock (which turned out to have a few performers who weren’t so godawful, but that was mostly a later judgment on my part - though I was prescient among my social set in not hating the Carpenters). Of course this death of rock cleared the way for other interesting rock, but I knew how McLean felt in “American Pie,” even if his labored metaphors were worth a lot of guffaws.

(I do hope Tom will have acquainted himself with Jacques Brel’s Le Moribond before we do. A grasp of colloquial French might help too)

Also don’t forget there are two “All Around The World”s coming up…

However, 1 point is way too harsh.

Does this put it lower than “All around the world” ?

Weathered faces lined with pain indeed.

True, there’s a ‘they’ in there. But isn’t there always, in the rhetoric of the depressive? For me, the key line is with eyes that know the darkness in my soul - that’s the one that first comes to my mind. That’s the only ‘my’ in the song and it hits harder for that. “I’m lonely, and nobody understands me, just like they didn’t understand you. While everybody else is out grooving to Bolan, I find a kindred spirit looking at your paintings, but they don’t understand that.’

Self-indulgent? Yes, of course it is, and in spades. But that’s what depression is all about.

It sold a grillion copies so I can’t imagine it’s been forgotten!

“Evan Dando is a good-looking guy with more luck than talent and more talent than brains who conceals his narcissism beneath an unassuming suburban drawl. Twenty years ago he would have affected an acoustic guitar and acted sincere; now he affects a slacker-pop band and acts vulnerable. His songs don’t bite, they sidle over and nibble your ear when you’re not looking, and if you throw him a withering glance, no problem–he’ll just move on to someone else.”

I actually was disappointed there wasn’t a “Too high” choice for this song. Clearly, there’s something about McLean’s attitude and strategy you’ve described that pushes my buttons. That says as much about me as it does about the song, of course, but it doesn’t make what you’ve said any less true.

I love the backing track of “American Pie.” It’s especially enjoyable to hear the drummer’s determination to never repeat a fill over the seven minutes of the song, and Paul Griffin’s sped-up piano-roll fills.

Here’s an aspect of “Pie” that I’d never thought of before now that’s both startling and all-too-familiar: the “all is lost” view of pop and rock circa 1971-72 is based solely and completely on music made by white artists. Other than the early mention of the Book of Love, there’s not a single black artist referenced anywhere in the song. As ever, that’s a disturbing and infuriating view of popular music in the 1960s and ’70s. But, even if we buy his argument that white music was beyond redemption by this time, a roll call of the black acts who were having huge hits with great music at exactly the moment Mclean was recording “Pie” make his argument look plain silly.

Setting up a ludicrous “them” in a context which feels like a wild cry for help or attention (or whatever) is a very different matter from setting up a bad “them” in a song which feels like it’s tellling a tale with a clear point or (worse) a clear moral.

For me, inevitably, the literary equivalent in a way is Plath - a not-unknown-to-poetry-circles person in her life, and only after her death did her great fame (and greatest works) get their due, alongside a great deal of understandable sentiment, which could get melodramatic at times, to say the least. Somehow, for me anyway, the sentiment is justified by the greatness of the work because it is sad to see great talent die young, whatever the medium…and “Perhaps, they never will…” can either mean “There will always be people who think the Mona Lisa is the best painting ever and everything after that is just messing around” or “There will always be people who buy a print of ‘Sunflowers’ and put it up on the wall in their house because it ‘goes’ with their decor who don’t know the slightest thing about Van Gogh besides he seemed to like the color yellow, so maybe they should get something else by him.”