Fifty-five years later, the music is alive. “American Pie,” the iconic 1971 single from Don McLean, has tallied more than a billion streams on Spotify, making it the latest addition to the Spotify Billions Club. It’s McLean’s first entry into the prestigious tier.

Upon its release in the fall of 1971, “American Pie” became a cultural phenomenon. The song spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and developed a reputation as one of the defining hits of its era. Tracing the history of 1960s rock ‘n’ roll in cryptic, poetic verses, punctuated by deaths stretching from Buddy Holly’s plane crash to the tragedy at Altamont, McLean’s folk-rock anthem worked as a postscript on a decade of whirlwind transformation.

Though fans and critics spent decades parsing McLean’s signature hit, he wouldn’t begin interpreting it until 2015, when his handwritten lyrics and notes were auctioned off for $1.2 million. At the time, he confirmed that the song is about American life moving in a bad direction, toward a less idyllic reality. “I don’t know whether you consider that wrong or right,” he said in a catalog accompanying the lyrics sheet, “but it is a morality song in a sense.”

“American Pie” later became the subject of an in-depth documentary released on Paramount+. In 2022’s The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s American Pie, McLean offered new clarity on the motives and meanings behind his lyrics while also disputing some of the most common interpretations. He framed the song as a work of impressionism, sometimes alluding to real life but not based in historical events—a slippery quality that surely contributed to its mythic status.

Stretching past eight and a half minutes, “American Pie” is the sixth longest song to ever chart on the Hot 100. For nearly 50 years it held the record as the longest song to reach No. 1 before being unseated by Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” in 2021. In its earliest pressing, McLean’s song was broken up across two sides of a 7-inch single. Given its extensive runtime, it’s all the more remarkable that “American Pie” became such a fixture at radio stations worldwide.

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