[ Post a Response | a messageboard for fans of Donny McLean ]
Posted by BillH on June 18, 2009, 5:51 pm, in reply to "Re: NEW interview with Don - just published"
Can't keep up with you now young Martin. I just found and read this interview and was going to post it here to find I had been beaten to it!
Mostly stock stuff though I am sure Don will be glad to be 10 years younger...it's about when he started promising Addicted to Black anyway! 
I hadn't heard the swim team stuff before though. That must be why his favourite sport is Olympic swimming.
BTW there is a second page to the interview so I will earn my corn by posting that!!
I have a friend who has a theory that people are born a certain age - like she was born 35, very reliable and mature and perhaps overly responsible. You're a guy who seemed to have amazing insight and depth at a very young age - for example, on Tapestry you talked about how Judy Garland was sort of destroyed by celebrity and more recently you've written about how Princess Diana was destroyed by celebrity. Were you born an adult or as a sort of old soul?
I'm not sure. I do know that the trick for me was to get away from me as much as possible, so I tended and tend to look and focus in-depth on others. I do feel so much now the days passing faster - I think that enhances this sense and interest in history that has always been there. I guess I would say I was born a 10-year-old and still am because I didn't like to accept the realities of life when I was 10 and I don't now.
On a related theme, you said in an interview a few years ago that even when things were going well - wife and kids are great, career going well - there was always an essential misery for you. Is that still the case and do you think that that kind of suffering is necessary to the artistic process?
There's a certain longing that has been with me my whole life, and it's always there. A sense of loss even before there was a lot of loss. Right now, I still find it hard to grasp that when I was a kid we would have these family gatherings with all the aunts and uncles and others gathered - and they're gone. All gone. As we all get older, I guess we are supposed to get tougher and we're supposed to slough everything off and move on. But not all of us are so good at that.
(Don McLean performs tomorrow night at 8 at the Capitol Center for the Arts. Tickets are $12.50 to $43 and can be purchased at 225-1111 or ccanh.com.)
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