If you’ve ever wanted to know what “American Pie” is REALLY about, Tuesday may be your day.
The handwritten lyrics to the famous song are scheduled to be auctioned off by Christie’s.
“I’m going to be 70 this year,” singer and songwriter Don McLean told Rolling Stone in February. “I have two children and a wife, and none of them seem to have the mercantile instinct. I want to get the best deal that I can for them. It’s time.”
Over the years, “American Pie” has become one of the most dissected and argued-about songs in the pop music canon. McLean has said that the opening lines were inspired by the death of Buddy Holly, but after that, it’s all been conjecture — which hasn’t stopped a marching band’s worth of analysts from trying to parse the symbols in the 8-minute, 33-second opus.
“Over the years I’ve dealt with all these stupid questions of ‘Who’s that?’ and ‘Who’s that?’ ” McLean said. “These are things I never had in my head for a second when I wrote the song. I was trying to capture something very ephemeral and I did, but it took a long time.”
The song catapulted the former folk singer to headliner status. The song hit No. 1 in early 1972, despite its length. (The 45-rpm single split the song in half on its A and B sides.)
The draft up for auction is 16 pages: 237 lines of manuscript and 26 lines of typed text, according to Christie’s, including lines that didn’t make the final version. The auction house believes it could fetch $1.5 million.
The record for a popular music manuscript is held by Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which sold for $2 million in June.
McLean told Reuters that all will be revealed Tuesday.
“The writing and the lyrics will divulge everything there is to divulge,” he said.