Don McLean performs during a taping for Dolly Parton's Smoky Mountain Rise Telethon Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2016, in Nashville, Tenn. Parton has lined up an all-star list of performers for a three-hour telethon to raise money for thousands of people whose homes were damaged or destroyed in Tennessee wildfires. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

When on tour, Don McLean provides a different live show every time he performs.

“I think that the audience can come back and see me multiple times, and they are not going to see the same show every time,” McLean said in a phone conversation.

He said he will introduce new songs into the show and because of that, the show will evolve and change.

“I do a different show every night. And I have for 50 years. I never have a set list or anything like that,” McLean said.

McLean will be performing at Struthers Library Theatre, 302 W. Third Ave., Warren, Pa. at 8 p.m. Saturday.

McLean, according to a press statement, is a legendary singer-songwriter known for his timeless classic songs, “American Pie,” “Vincent,” “Crying,” and “Castles In In The Air,” that have captured the hearts of audiences worldwide. With a career spanning several decades, he has left a lasting impact on the music industry and continues to inspire new generations of artists. McLean’s songs are known for their poetic lyrics and emotional depth, reflecting universal themes of love, loss, and the American experience. His songs have been recorded by Madonna, Garth Brooks, Josh Groban, and Drake.

When writing songs, McLean said he has a vision in his mind, like a small film, that he uses for each song. He tries to encapsulate and capture those visions in the making of the record, so he can try to get exactly what he is after. He said that empathy is also important when writing songs.

“You have to have empathy for things,” McLean said. “You can’t be a hard-hearted person. You have to have something that moves people, and moves you first of all, to try to capture that emotion.”

Because of today’s “cancel culture,” McLean said, artists may be afraid of saying what they really think. He said that since he first scored a major hit with “American Pie” in 1971, he has written what matters to him and has not been afraid to express his ideas. “Cancel Culture,” Merriam-Webster.com said, refers to the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure (with social media platforms).

“I’m merely being who I always have been, and writing about what matters to me, regardless of the fact that the world has changed in a very stupid way, I might say. It’s very stupid for people to fear, any other point of view to the point where if you express it, you could lose your job or something. It’s the same kind of thing as the black list in the 1950s. This is very stupid. And it shows we’ve taken a very, ignorant path, I believe,” McLean said.

“American Pie,” McLean said, is an iconic song that took about 10 years to put together because he was obsessed with the plane crash of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper. The song is as fresh today as it was when it first came out.

“That was the trick – to get it as a lyric style that would allow me to, when I sang the song … feel each verse. You were moving forward to something,” McLean said.

The singer-songwriter said that he thought about Buddy Holly a lot during the 1960s, and that’s how he wrote the song – the idea of a big song about America.

“I wrote this beginning with the Buddy Holly crash ‘a long, long time ago,’ part of the song and I said, ‘That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. That’s how I’m going to use this memory and I’m going to key everything to this moment, the day the music died,’ ” McLean added.

He went on to explain that each verse describes many things that happened on that day the music died.

“And I think American Pie has a usefulness which has been built into it, which keeps people interested,” McLean added.

Currently, he said, Taylor Swift is the most successful songwriter because she writes personal songs about love and feelings that are in the moment.

“She just does these beautiful songs about surviving breakups,” McLean noted.

McLean’s advice to up-and-coming musicians wanting to break in the business of rock ‘n’ roll and popular music is that a musician has to make a good recording of the song or the musician will lose the song.

“Hit records, if you have a lot of them, you’re a big star, if you have a few of them, you’re a medium sized or so, but that’s what fuels success, and longevity in this business is hit records – real ones, not the kind they have now that come and go very quickly,” he said.

For ticket information, call the box office at (814) 723-7231 or visit strutherslibrarytheatre.org.