Don McLean Keeps Evolving Because 'I Don't Want to Be in a Dead Relationship with Music or Another Person' (Exclusive)

The "American Pie" singer opens up about his new album, difficulties in his childhood and where he stands with his daughter after she accused him of abuse

At 78, Don McLean is still chasing romance — in both his personal and professional lives.

"I'm not interested necessarily in big numbers. That's not romantic," the "American Pie" singer tells PEOPLE over the phone from his home in Palm Springs, Calif. "In fact, when I got successful, I think it took a lot of the romance out of my career. I want to be thrilled. I don't want to be in a stodgy, taken for granted, dead relationship either with my music or with another person."

Those feelings factored largely into the making of McLean's new album, American Boys, out Friday, May 17.

"I mean, people are living lives of quiet desperation," he says. "They do the same thing over and over. I never got stuck in, for example, doing 'American Pie II,' 'American Pie III,' 'American Pie IV.' You have to have integrity."

Across the 13 tracks, McLean pays tribute to his rock and roll heroes like Elvis Presley and Little Richard, while also drawing inspiration from the stories of former King of England Henry VIII and the late George Floyd.

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While writing his spoken-word song "Vacant Luxury" on the album, McLean recalled how Henry VIII "would take his entire entourage, which was everybody that mattered in London, and they would move every two weeks to avoid the plague."

"That's exactly what people were doing during those pandemic years," he says. "They were running to the country and offering big money to get out. It happened a lot in Camden, Maine, where I have property. People were coming from the cities like crazy and buying folks' houses at twice the price."

Floyd's murder in 2020, meanwhile, inspired him to write "The Ballad of George Floyd."

"When I heard about George Floyd calling for his mother, I said, 'A man calling for his mother is not going to be that dangerous,'" he says. "That spoke to my heart and allowed me to write 'The Ballad of George Floyd.' When you're up against it, you call for your mother."

While speaking of Floyd, McLean remembers how he'd call out for his own mom Elizabeth as a kid during hard nights growing up in New Rochelle, N.Y.

"When I was young, I had to fight asthma and pneumonia, and I nearly died a few times," he says. "I learned to be a fighter. My mother, God bless her, I would be so sick that she gave me a baseball bat when I was 8 or 6 or 7, and she said, 'If you can't breathe, just pound this on the floor and I'll wake up and come and help you.' I would call for my mother in the middle of the night, and I would be crying and I couldn't breathe, and she'd change the bed, and I'm sweating and it's awful. Awful. I've had an uphill fight my whole life for everything."

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After years of health issues, McLean hit another major setback when he was 15 and his dad, Donald, died of a heart attack.

"When my father died was when I realized life would never be the same again," he says. "That was a powerful moment. Everything was destroyed. I had to take over and be the man of the house. I had to make decisions. I was 15 years old and I was telling [my mom] what to do because she couldn't stop crying, and I couldn't either, but I had to take care of everything, so I had to learn to suck it up and do what's necessary. I was already pretty strong from having survived a few bouts of pneumonia growing up and nearly dying, so after my father passed away, I knew what I had to do."

At 16, McLean bought his first guitar and started performing at venues across the country. After being rejected a reported 72 times by record labels, he finally released his debut album, Tapestry, in 1970.

"It's the biggest thrill in the world when you've really fought through," he says. "Tapestry became an underground sensation. I mean, I was playing colleges and selling out shows everywhere."

McLean's mainstream breakthrough came when he released his sophomore album, American Pie, in 1971. The title track spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972, and it remains a classic to this day.

"All that pain in my music is from things in me," McLean says. "There's a lot of pain in my songs. Let's face it. I'm a very emotional person. I have a lot of things that I have to keep down. I mean, I cover it with humor, but there's a lot of pain that you accumulate as you grow older."

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In a 2021 story, Rolling Stone quoted McLean as saying he grew up in a physically abusive household with his parents. He denies these allegations now.

"Absolutely not true," he says. "I was never abused as a child at all. No, my parents were wonderful people, but they were very normal like everybody else. And let me tell you something, everybody was very American and very conservative back in those days. And you didn't talk back to your parents and you did what you were told."

"Today people would consider that to be too controlling, but somebody had to be the boss of the house," he adds. "My parents loved me and were very good to me, but I have been through a ton of difficulty in my personal life and also in my public life."

In the same Rolling Stone story, McLean's daughter Jackie — with ex-wife Patrisha Shnier — accused him of years of emotional and mental abuse. He also denies these allegations. (Along with Jackie, McLean and Shnier share son Wyatt.)

"I love my daughter, I love my son," McLean says. "I devoted myself to my family. I was the best father and husband I knew how to be. As far as my daughter is concerned, we had spoken about this four years before. Every single thing she brought up in that interview, we straightened out personally between each other. I apologized to her, and I never wanted to hurt her."

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McLean believes she Jackie did the interview to "promote" her new record at the time, Another Life, with her indie rock band Roan Yellowthorn.

"I thought that was so trashy, and it really was beneath her, but that's what happened," he says. "So anyway, whatever people want is fine with me. I realize that you can't make people be the way you wish they would be, and so you have to just accept that. But it was very painful and a very bad decision, in my opinion."

While McLean says he and Wyatt remain close — he describes him as a "bookworm" — he and Jackie have not made amends. "We're kind of doing our own thing," he says.

The same can be said for him and Shnier, who had McLean arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in January 2016 after she called 911. He faced six charges, including domestic violence and assault, and pleaded guilty to four charges in July 2016 as part of a plea agreement. A year later, the domestic assault charge was dismissed.

In 2019, a representative for McLean — who paid fines for his remaining three charges and was not sentenced to jail time — told PEOPLE in a statement that the star pleaded guilty "not because he was in fact guilty of anything, but to provide closure for his family and to keep the whole process as private as possible.”

"I didn't love Patrisha anymore, and I was through with that," McLean says. "Then, to some degree, it was designed so that it could be a better settlement. I don't really know what was going on. There was a lot of conniving going on before that happened that I didn't know about."

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Shnier filed for divorce in March 2016, and it was finalized that June.

"There was no romance left," McLean says, harkening back to his earlier point. "The romance was gone. And I can't live with hostility and with disrespect and so on. I just don't want it. So I'd rather be alone than be in a situation where there's no more romance. I don't want my feet to touch the ground. I wish everybody well."

After the divorce, McLean says thing were "rough for about a year," but then he "began to put one foot in front of the other."

"I'm very positive, and I hate to go backwards and talk about that ugly time eight years ago because it's so negative," he says. "It's just not part of my DNA at all. It's tearing things down. And I'm a guy who builds things up."

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A bright point in the past decade? Going public with his girlfriend Paris Dylan, now 30, in 2018.

"I've been in love with her from the minute I saw her, it's so weird," he says. "It's almost eight and a half years now we've been together, and we have done so many things together all over the world, hundreds and hundreds of concerts. We just like each other a lot. We have a lot of laughs."

Despite a busy schedule between the new album release and tour dates running through December, McLean maintains he's living the "retired life."

"I mean, you can be retired and still make an album once in a while and still do shows here or there," he says. "You don't have to be the old country stars on the road for 300 days a year. I can pick and choose, and we stay at great resorts sometimes for a few days when we're going to do a show somewhere, and we turn it into a vacation and have the gig pay for it."

"Yeah, I am retired," he repeats. "I am retired. I think if I actually stopped doing anything and just sat here and looked at the television that I would soon pass away. I think that's a prescription for death."

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