Don McLean
Tapestry

THE REVIEW

The strange case of Don McLean: evaluating his career as a whole from 1972 onwards, one could easily consider him a good craftsman of song, a good author and excellent performer with a beautiful voice; labeling him as a one-hit wonder would still be a far too harsh judgment, but based on what was shown on his first two albums, this New York songwriter of distant Italian origins, raised on bread and Buddy Holly, seemed to promise an artistic path of a completely different level. Even before definitively establishing himself with "American Pie", McLean could already boast an extremely high-level debut, overall perhaps even superior to his more acclaimed successor.

A perfect manifesto of North American folk of those years, "Tapestry" is an album that looks to Bob Dylan as one of the most obvious and recognizable reference models but with much more humanity, much more humility, and a personal, sober, and acoustic approach, purely folk with an innate inclination for ballads, which would become his trademark and later also his limitation. This record is absolutely perfect, teetering between bitterness and subtle irony, marked by extremely high-level songwriting strongly centered on themes of social denunciation, which may even seem obvious during the years of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Henry Kissinger, but also of a more intimate nature, and further ennobling the final result is McLean's light, at times dreamlike and almost childlike voice, a wonderfully empathetic and moving voice. Songs like "Castles In The Air" and "Magdalene Lane" demonstrate exquisite class and an immediate and spontaneous style, strengthened by an intrinsic lightness and a visionary touch that colors these pure and elementary melodies, while "General Store" and especially "Three Flights Up" in terms of pessimism and severity would not be out of place on a contemporary Leonard Cohen record. Important and committed themes also characterize poignant ballads like "Tapestry" and "Orphans Of Wealth", love has very little space, confined to a wonderful heart-wrenching serenade like "And I Love You So", for the rest, there is room for the bitter irony of "Respectable", the bipolar alienation of "Bad Girl", the dreamy and blurred atmospheres of "Circus Song", and finally a small but beautiful ray of sunshine, "No Reasons For Your Dreams".

"Tapestry" is a sad album, blue just like its cover but light, which conveys feelings of sweetness, grace, fragility, poetry; many contemporary artists and songwriters, indie, alternative and committed, would give everything they have to be able to write songs even half as beautiful as those on this album, without unnecessary embellishments, with this emotional intensity, this sincerity that only an artist who is not concerned about appearing on glossy magazine covers and building a certain type of image can have, this gentle and velvety touch, this voice that speaks to the heart; it's truly a shame that this artist's magic was exhausted in just two albums, but in this brief period Don McLean touched heights that many celebrated stars have never reached nor ever will be able to reach.