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So the first line, a long, long time ago. You might hear this and think of Star Wars, but as I said, this is from 1971, and Star Wars A New Hope was first released in 1977, so perhaps George Lucas was influenced by Don McLean, but not the other way around.

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but what we can say with this a long long time ago I can still remember is that obviously he's

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not talking about 1971 he's talking about something that happened farther in the past

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and I'm going to give you a clue and tell you that it's about 1959

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and obviously 12 years have passed since then so maybe his memory could be faded but no he still

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remembers how the music used to make him smile. Now the use of the word used to here should be

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important because that's something that was true in the past but isn't true anymore. So music used

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to make him smile but now it doesn't. Now in 1971 he doesn't have that feeling with music anymore

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and that's what this whole song is going to be about, this loss of innocence in American music.

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all right then these next three lines go together i think quite well just think when you were a

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child and you saw a football star on tv and you thought i'm going to grow up and i'm going to be

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a football star and i'm going to be even better than him or i'm going to be an astronaut and i'm

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going to go to mars and to the moon children are always inspired by our parents by people on tv

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and in this case tom mclean was really influenced by the musicians of his time the ones who were

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always on the radio, and even on TV, because television was becoming popular in the 1950s and

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60s. And he felt the same way. These people made him so happy, he thought, if I could become a music

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star, maybe I could make them happy too. And as it turned out, with this hit song, he really did.

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Right, but now the song is going to take a turn for the worse.

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But February made me shiver with every paper I deliver. Bad news on the doorstep,

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I couldn't take one more step. Well, first we've got this verb shiver. And shiver is this action

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that we do that's like temblad, tiritad, tener escalofrios. This happens when you're cold, okay?

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February, it's cold. But that's also what we do when we hear something really shocking, news that

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we don't want to hear. So this is a play on words with shiver. Not only was it really cold in

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February of 1959, like I mentioned before, but also something shocking has happened. What?