As a child, I had no idea that nobody else felt that way much. Buddy Holly's death to me was a personal tragedy. It is from all these fantasies, all these memories that I made personal. And basically, all I had to do was speed up the slow verse with the chorus and then slow down the last verse so it was like the first verse, and then tell the story, which was a dream. Because I realized what it was, I knew what I had. And then one time about a month later I just woke up and wrote the other five verses. I came up with this chorus, crazy chorus. And then I thought, I can't have another slow song on this record. And I said, Oh, that is such a great idea. I thought, Whoa, what's that? And then the day the music died, it just came out. 'As I was fiddling around, I started singing this thing about the Buddy Holly crash, the thing that came out (singing), 'Long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.' 'For some reason I wanted to write a big song about America and about politics, but I wanted to do it in a different way,' he said. When he was a guest on the UK show Songbook, McLean talked about how he composed this song.
