Actually it was Lori Lieberman who wrote it about Don McLean after hearing this song in person
"Lori Lieberman didn’t want to go out. The singer, who had just turned 20, was struggling with the complicated affair that she says had started with her 44-year-old married manager, Norman Gimbel. But that November night in 1971, a friend coaxed her into seeing Don McLean at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles. He had just released “American Pie.”
Sitting in the audience, Lieberman found herself struck by another McLean song, a heartbreaking ballad, “Empty Chairs.”
“As soon as he started singing, she pulled out a napkin and starting scribbling notes,” remembers the friend, Michele Willens. “The rest is history.”
Lieberman says she later shared her experience — and her napkin poem — over the phone with Gimbel. As he said in multiple interviews during the 1970s, Gimbel already had a song title in his notebook that seemed to click with her feelings. He took the lyrics to Charles Fox, his piano-playing writing partner, and together they created a classic: Roberta Flack’s 1973 No. 1 hit, “Killing Me Softly with His Song.”
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