1972 · Behind the Songs
After “American Pie” and “Vincent,” McLean bet his next single on a child’s Hanukkah top — and made it stand for the spin of a life.
After “American Pie” and “Vincent,” Don McLean could have done anything. He had the number one single in America, the number one album, and a folk singer’s credibility intact. What he did next was characteristically stubborn: he released a single about a child’s spinning top. “Dreidel,” drawn from his self-titled third album, reached number twenty-one on the Billboard chart in 1972 — a solid hit, but a deliberate step away from the epic scale of its predecessors. It is a small song about a small object, and it may be the most McLean-like record he ever made: plainspoken, melodic, and built around a metaphor he trusted the listener to understand.
The Don McLean album arrived in 1972, barely a year after American Pie had changed its author’s life. McLean reunited with producer Ed Freeman, the man who had kept the previous record spare and honest, and with a familiar rhythm section: bassist Rob Rothstein, who also recorded as Rob Stoner, and pianist Warren Bernhardt. The brief was simple — no orchestras, no concept, just songs. Where American Pie had been assembled from years of writing, the new album had to be written in the glare of sudden fame, and it shows in the best way: the songs are tighter, warmer, and less awed by their own ambition. “Dreidel” was the record’s calling card, the single chosen to reintroduce a star who had no interest in repeating himself.
A dreidel is a four-sided spinning top, traditionally played with during Hanukkah. Each face bears a Hebrew letter — nun, gimel, he, and shin — and players spin for a pot of tokens, usually nuts or candy, winning or losing according to the letter that lands face-up. It is a gambling game for children, played in the light of the menorah, and its charm is its blend of chance and ritual. McLean, who grew up in the folk tradition of finding big meanings in small things, evidently saw the top as a ready-made metaphor: a life set spinning by forces larger than itself, wobbling, recovering, and finally falling still. He did not need to explain the game to his audience; the image did the work.
The lyric sketches a narrator watching his own life the way you watch a top spin — set in motion, briefly graceful, and subject to a fall he cannot prevent. It is not a religious song, though its central image comes from a religious tradition; it is a song about momentum and helplessness, about the strange calm of accepting that the spin is the whole story. McLean sings it without theatricality, in the warm baritone that “American Pie” had made famous, and the understatement is the point. Where lesser writers would have turned the metaphor into a sermon, McLean lets it turn on its own, the way the top does.
Released as a single, “Dreidel” climbed to number twenty-one on the Billboard Hot 100 — a respectable showing that looks modest only beside the twin landmarks that preceded it. Following “American Pie” (four weeks at number one) and “Vincent” (number twelve) was a task no single could survive gracefully, and McLean seems not to have tried. The choice of “Dreidel” as the single reads, in retrospect, as a declaration of independence: the new star would not chase another epic. He would release the small, strange song he believed in and let the charts do what they would. They did reasonably well, and the album that carried it kept him firmly in the first rank of seventies singer-songwriters.
The Don McLean album itself deserves more attention than it gets. Cut quickly in the afterglow of its predecessor, it has the relaxed feel of a musician playing for the love of it rather than for history. Freeman’s production keeps everything close and dry; Rothstein’s bass walks with a jazzman’s ease, and Bernhardt’s piano gives the record its gentle swing. In later years McLean would range widely — the “Crying” revival of 1981, the country chart entries, the Songwriters Hall of Fame induction of 2012 — but the self-titled album captures him at the hinge, famous enough to be free and young enough to enjoy it.
Cover versions of “Dreidel” are few, and the song has never been anthologized to death — which may be why it still sounds fresh. It turns up in McLean’s concerts, where audiences greet its opening figure like an old friend, and it holds a quiet place in the catalog as the moment the “American Pie” phenomenon became a career. The metaphor has outlasted the chart run: everyone, at some point, feels like a top set spinning by someone else’s hand. McLean’s achievement was to take a child’s Hanukkah game and make it stand for that feeling without ever forcing the connection.
What to listen for: the lilt. Bernhardt’s piano gives the song a gentle forward roll, Rothstein’s bass keeps it grounded, and McLean’s vocal rides above both with the ease of a man who knows exactly what the song is about. Notice how the arrangement never swells — no strings, no choir, no drama — and how the song ends the way a top stops: not with a crash but with a wobble and a settling. It is three minutes of perfect balance, and then it is still.
The year 1972 was crowded with singer-songwriters, and “Dreidel” held its own among them — a modest hit that asked for nothing but a listen. Decades later, it remains a litmus test for McLean fans: those who know only the two giants nod politely, while those who know “Dreidel” smile with the quiet satisfaction of people in on a secret. It is the sound of an artist refusing to be a monument to himself, choosing instead to spin a small top across a table and watch where it lands. The charts measured it at number twenty-one. The song itself was never interested in the measurement.