This interview with a now 75-year-old Don McLean offers a number of insights into the singer, but the one revelation to me is that he originally wrote a final verse for the iconic song that wrapped the whole 7-minute plus opus on a happy, upbeat note - but then decided not to include it. 

"McLean did come up with a more upbeat verse where the music gets “reborn” at the end. But he ditched it. “Things weren’t going that way,” he says. “I didn’t see America improving intellectually or politically. It was going steadily downhill, and so was the music.”

I'd love to read that last missing verse!

Don McLean: ‘American Pie is a biographical song’