After ‘American Pie,’ McLean’s Music Didn’t Die : Pop music: The singer continues to contentedly write, record and tour but he says there won’t be a sequel to the ’72 song that brought most of his fame.

As far as many pop fans are concerned, the day Don McLean’s “American Pie” dropped off the charts 20 years ago was the day the singer’s career died.

Sure, he had other hits: “Vincent,” “Dreidel,” a version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” But the enigmatic, much-analyzed “American Pie” still stands as such a pop landmark that for many it completely overshadows McLean’s later accomplishments and leaves the impression that he was a one-hit wonder.

Through the years, a standard portrayal of the singer-songwriter emerged: He was bitter and arrogant over those circumstances, it was suggested, and even wished he’d never written the song in the first place.

Try again.

“A lot of people wish I wished that,” McLean said, seeming not at all bitter as he relaxed in the restaurant of a Beverly Hills hotel. “It’s not the true story, but it’s the one I was hung with from Day One. ‘American Pie’ was such an event, like ‘War of the Worlds.’ It was supposed to be my one moment of glory. But I fooled them. I survived.”

McLean, 47, today lives what many would consider an ideal life. He continues to write and record (his latest album, “Headroom,” just came out on Curb Records, and he’s written songs for a musical, “Till Tomorrow,” which is opening in Britain soon). And he performs concerts--usually acoustic--as often as he chooses (60 to 70 times a year) while spending as much time as he can on his large spread of land in idyllic Camden, Me.

The irony is that it’s neither “American Pie” nor even “Vincent”--his contemplation of Vincent Van Gogh and his painting “Starry Night”--that leads the way in his personal success story. Both continue to do well for him; “American Pie” recently broke the Top 10 again in Britain, having been reissued for its 20th anniversary, and Julio Iglesias recently completed a “Starry Night” tour that centered on “Vincent,” which is also slated to be the subject of a new animated film from the makers of “FernGully . . . The Last Rain Forest.”

But the top item in his catalogue is the romantic ballad “And I Love Her So,” which charted in versions by Perry Como and Elvis Presley and has been recorded by hundreds of other singers.

“It’s been played on the radio more than 2 million times,” McLean said. “It’s the biggest copyright I own.”

Still, he’s not the least bit bothered by the continued focus on his most visible hits.

“If the media and the public only remember me for five things, fine,” he said. “But there are other people like me who will be interested in the other things I’m doing.”

Even if the public at large focuses on other songs of his, “American Pie” will certainly always be his most analyzed work. Twenty years after the fact, its capsulized history of pop music seems less puzzling than at the time of its release, when it was combed over line by line in schoolyards and in magazines. But McLean says that people still ask him about the meanings of particular lines.

“I never really answer when people ask me what the lines mean,” he said. “But I do like the line about ‘A generation lost in space with no time left to start again.’ That was my moment in the song.”

In some ways, McLean was the first folk singer of the television and rock ‘n’ roll generation--at least the first to write from the television and rock ‘n’ roll experience. He did an apprenticeship with Pete Seeger, yet dedicated the “American Pie” album to Buddy Holly and Hopalong Cassidy.

“I never was connected to my generation. I wrote things my generation never knew they felt. James Taylor was connected to it. But I wrote things from stories I lived, or events from the ‘50s that meant something to me.”

Today “American Pie” is still such a powerful piece of a lost generation’s nostalgia that it’s hard to believe that it was written only 13 years after Holly’s death--”the day the music died” that is the song’s keystone. It’s also natural to wonder whether McLean’s been tempted to bring the song up to the present.

“For me to do ‘American Pie II’ or ‘III’ or ‘American Pie for the ‘90s’ wouldn’t work, though people have told me I should update it,” he said. “To be able to walk away a winner and do it the way you want is great.”