1974 · Behind the Songs
The title track of a 1974 album, cut in Alabama.
By 1974, Don McLean was three albums into a career that “American Pie” had changed forever. For his fourth album, Homeless Brother, he left New York behind and recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama — the small-town studio founded by the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the players whose work had shaped hits for Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and the Rolling Stones. The move gave the record a warmer, rootsier feel than anything he had cut before.
The title track, “Homeless Brother,” is a character portrait of a drifter — a man with no fixed address and no regrets about it. McLean sings it with plainspoken sympathy, and the Muscle Shoals players give the song an easy, unhurried groove that suits the subject perfectly. It was never a hit, but it stands as one of McLean’s most quietly humane story songs: a folk narrative dressed in Southern soul session craft.
The album itself is a fascinating stop in McLean’s catalog: caught between the folk stardom of the early seventies and the country-pop success he would find later in the decade with “Crying.” “Homeless Brother” the song captures that in-between feeling — a traveler passing through, belonging everywhere and nowhere at once.