It is the quietest famous thing Don McLean ever did. American Pie, released in October 1971, was built around an eight-and-a-half-minute title track that rewrote rock and roll history as allegory, and it contained Vincent, his luminous portrait of Vincent van Gogh. Between those two monuments sat a song of three minutes and twenty-four seconds about coming home to a house where love had left: Empty Chairs. Yet within weeks, a twenty-year-old singer in a Los Angeles club heard McLean sing it, felt as if he were reading her diary aloud, and scribbled her feelings on a napkin. That napkin led, through telephone calls, notebooks and denials, to Killing Me Softly with His Song, one of the biggest hits of the 1970s. Few album tracks have ever had a stranger second life.
A Marriage Ending, Line by Line
McLean wrote the songs on American Pie in a period of private collapse. His first marriage was failing as he worked, and the album he conceived as a unified whole — taking the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as proof that a record could hold together as one statement — carries that melancholy through almost every track. He dedicated it to Buddy Holly, but its emotional centre is present-tense loss, not nostalgia.
Empty Chairs is the plainest statement of it. The narrator has been told that the woman he loves intends to leave, and the refrain is his stunned admission that he never believed her: although you said you’d go, until you did, I never thought you would. The song opens in the small hours, with the trembling tingle of a sleepless night, and moves through a home filling up with evidence — her flowers left behind like a sympathy bouquet for a love that has died — until the final verse lands on the image the whole song has been circling: empty rooms, echoing stairs, and empty clothes that drape and fall on empty chairs. The title image is mentioned once, in the last lines — and it is enough.
The Chair He Did Not Know He Had Borrowed
Listeners have often assumed the chairs came straight from Van Gogh; the truth, in McLean’s own telling, is subtler. The album is saturated with the painter: Vincent was written after McLean read a Van Gogh biography and sat with a print of The Starry Night. Asked years later about Empty Chairs, McLean added: Van Gogh did a painting of an empty chair, and I didn’t realize it until someone told me that. It must have been in my subconscious, because I was always looking at art and reading in those days.
The painting he meant, Van Gogh’s Chair, shows the artist’s wooden chair with his pipe and tobacco on the seat — a self-portrait with the sitter missing. Consciously borrowed or not, the kinship is exact: in the painting and in the song, a chair becomes unbearable because of who is no longer sitting in it.
Cut at the Record Plant
The album was recorded in May and June 1971 in Studio A at the Record Plant on West 44th Street in New York, with producer Ed Freeman, who also wrote the string arrangements. Freeman hired accomplished players who were not, in his phrase, studio musicians who could act like a metronome, rehearsed the title track for two weeks, and chased feel over precision; some vocal parts took twenty-four takes, because McLean rarely phrased a line the same way twice. Empty Chairs, sequenced sixth, rides on McLean’s guitar and voice, with Freeman’s strings arriving almost unnoticed underneath.
United Artists released American Pie in October 1971, and it reached number one on the Billboard 200. Its singles were the title track and Vincent. Empty Chairs was never issued as an A-side single of its own — in Britain it surfaced only as the B-side of an early pressing of American Pie — which makes what happened next improbable: its fame arrived through other people’s voices, beginning with a live performance. McLean has said he loves slow songs, and that Vincent and Empty Chairs are exercises in controlling time.
One Night at the Troubadour
In November 1971, Lori Lieberman was twenty, newly signed to a management and songwriting arrangement with lyricist Norman Gimbel and composer Charles Fox. Her friend Michele Willens took her to see McLean at the Troubadour in West Hollywood. American Pie was climbing the charts, but it was Empty Chairs that stopped her. “When he sang Empty Chairs, I honestly felt that he was singing straight to me,” she later said. “I felt like he was up there reading my diary, and singing about me and my life.”
Willens watched her scribbling notes on a napkin as soon as the song began, and Lieberman stayed in her seat after the show, writing a poem about the experience. Then she phoned Gimbel and read him her notes, describing a singer reaching inside her private world. Gimbel recognised something: in his notebook he already kept a phrase adapted from Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch, killing us softly with some blues. Lieberman’s account gave the phrase its subject. Gimbel shaped her language into lyrics — “Her conversation fed me, inspired me, gave me some language and a choice of words,” he said in 1973 — and, by Lieberman’s account, she argued that “blues” was wrong and “song” was right. Fox set the words to music.
From a Napkin to Number One
Lieberman recorded Killing Me Softly with His Song in late 1971 and released it as a single on Capitol in 1972, produced by Gimbel and Fox. She received no writing credit, and the record did not chart, but she toured introducing it with the story of the McLean concert — an introduction Gimbel and Fox themselves wrote for her. Roberta Flack heard Lieberman’s record on an aeroplane’s in-flight audio programme. The title, she recalled, smacked her in the face; she drew musical staves on scratch paper, played the song eight to ten times, and wrote down the melody. Two days after landing, she had the music.
Flack’s version, released on January 22, 1973, spent five non-consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in February and March — more weeks on top than any other record that year — and finished as Billboard‘s number three song of 1973. It won the Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, while Gimbel and Fox took Song of the Year. McLean, on learning the song described his singing, responded in 1973: “I’m absolutely amazed. I’ve heard both Lori’s and Roberta’s version and I must say I’m very humbled about the whole thing.”
The Fight Over Whose Night It Was
For years, everyone told the same story: Gimbel and Fox confirmed Lieberman’s role throughout the 1970s, and Billboard described the three as a songwriting team. The partnership broke down in 1976, and around 1997 the two men changed their account, downplaying her part and eventually denying she had any involvement in creating the song. Fox’s 2010 memoir, Killing Me Softly, My Life in Music, omitted the McLean concert entirely, and Fox told Songfacts the Troubadour story was an urban legend.
In 2008, Gimbel demanded that McLean remove the account from his website, threatening legal action. McLean refused, and his lawyer sent Gimbel the April 5, 1973 New York Daily News article in which Gimbel himself described Lieberman’s “strong experience” listening to McLean, and the three of them discussing it as a song. McLean kept the story online and championed Lieberman publicly. The official credit, however, still reads Fox and Gimbel alone; reference works now list Lieberman as an uncredited collaborator. In 2020 she said she wanted no money or credit line, only the song’s true origin known — and the contemporary record, exhumed from 1973, is on her side.
The Song That Stayed in the Room
Empty Chairs never needed the charts. It stayed where it began, as a fixture of McLean’s concerts for decades: Wolf Trap audiences heard him perform it in 2013, more than forty years on. Lieberman closed her own circle too, recording Empty Chairs for her 2019 album The Girl and the Cat and performing it linked to Killing Me Softly, the song it accidentally started. When the Fugees took Killing Me Softly to number one around the world in 1996, a new generation inherited a lineage leading back to a three-minute album track about a man, a staircase, and furniture that had outlasted love.
McLean built American Pie as a total listening experience; its monuments are the long title track and Vincent. But its quietest song may be its most consequential — the one that emptied a chair in Los Angeles in November 1971, and filled a napkin that changed three careers.
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