As happy as Don McLean is to still be popular, he's even happier he's still alive.

Growing up with chronic severe asthma, the American Pie guy has struggled with health for most of his 62 years.

But one of the happier side effects of those years he practised deep breathing in addition to his generally healthy lifestyle, is that he sings just as well as when his classic song American Pie rocked rock radio 35 years ago.

"I'm on my fourth comeback," McLean laughs from his rickety old mansion in Rhode Island.

"I was so sick as a child with asthma that I love to breathe, I love to have my health because I fought for it constantly growing up. When I was finally able to get myself together in the 1980s with my first comeback Crying, that's when I really got my health together.

"I'm glad I made it," he adds with understated humour. "So many of us didn't make it out of the 1960s. I'm happily married and stayed away from drugs and drinking that ruins so many people."

McLean isn't out of the woods when it comes to his health. It's a condition that can flare up any time. Consequently, he takes a medical kit of inhalers and anti-histamines everywhere he goes.

"Some places in Canada where there are tall grasses where I'll immediately have an asthmatic reaction. So I have to be careful."

When he was young, McLean's asthma meant long stays at home, which he spent listening to his father's records and playing guitar. He eventually broke into the folk music scene, playing clubs and coffee houses. It wasn't easy.

McLean slept in his car for 10 years until his first record Tapestry came out in 1969. McLean had his first hit song And I Love You So.

Then in 1971, he released American Pie, the rambling nine-minute rock and roll dreamscape about McLean's idols Buddy Holly and Frank Sinatra that eventually went on to become one of the top five pop songs of the century, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

"When I was 12, Buddy Holly became my favourite thing in the world because his songs were so happy. Then, as a paperboy in 1959, I read that he was killed. That's the first time I experienced that depression over a death. I wanted to write a song about that."

"I think about my songs like a movie, conceptually, and I build a song like a house. So when I wrote about Buddy Holly, I just let ideas flow out of me, beginning with the line "the day the music died." That stayed in my mind for months. Then I imagined this whole rock dream several months later. By the time we recorded American Pie, it was nine minutes long. It became a hit because, even at nine minutes, it was well made."

Then, in 1973, Perry Como's cover of And I Love You So was nominated for a Grammy but lost to a song about McLean, Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly With His Song.

In the 30 years since American Pie, McLean's songs have been covered by Madonna, The Fugees, Guns 'N Roses, George Michaels and Garth Brooks.

"I have no idea of what I'm doing. I have no idea of why what happened in my career happened the way it did. But I knew instictively to follow certain roads. It continues to happen now after 40 years. People continue to come to the concerts. I'm popular around the world. It's all worked out."