vincent (starry, starry night)

Don McLean painted a beautiful musical picture of pure admiration and empathy for Vincent van Gogh. He says he wrote 'Vincent' during a bleak time in his own life: "I was in a bad marriage that was torturing me. I was tortured. I wasn't as badly off as Vincent was, but I wasn't thrilled, let's put it that way...I had a job singing in the school system, playing my guitar in classrooms. I was sitting on the veranda one morning, reading a biography of Van Gogh, and suddenly I knew I had to write a song arguing that he wasn't crazy. He had an illness and so did his brother Theo. This makes it different, in my mind, to the garden variety of 'crazy' – because he was rejected by a woman. So I sat down with a print of Starry Night and wrote the lyrics out on a paper bag...But then I thought, well, how do you do this? Again, I wanted to have each thing be different. I'm looking through the book and fiddling around and I saw the painting. I said, Wow, just tell the story using the color, the imagery, the movement, everything that's in the painting. Because that's him more than he is him. One thing I want to say is that music is like poetry in so many ways. You have wit and drama and humor and pathos and anger and all of these things create the subtle tools that an artist, a stage artist, a good one, uses. Sadly, this has really gone out of music completely. So it makes someone like me a relic, because I am doing things and people like me are doing things that utilize all the classic means of emotional expression."

'Vincent' went to number twelve on the US pop chart, three in Canada, two on the US adult contemporary chart, and number one in the UK.










http://www.don-mclean.com/

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and grey
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the
Darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land.

And now I understand
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen
They did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now.

Starry, starry night
Flaming flo'rs that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze reflect in
Vincent's eyes of China blue.
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's
Loving hand.

And now I understand
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free.
Perhaps they'll listen now.

For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night.
You took your life
As lovers often do;
But I could have told you
Vincent
This world was never
Meant for one
As beautiful as you.

Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes
That watch the world and can't forget.
Like the stranger that you've met

The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken
On the virgin snow.

And now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity

How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen
They're not list'ning still
Perhaps they never will.