MacArthur Park

With the famous "cake out in the rain," this is one of the more lyrically intriguing songs ever recorded. MacArthur Park is a real park in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, but that's about the only tangible reference. Jimmy Webb, who wrote the song, explained in Q magazine: "It's clearly about a love affair ending, and the person singing it is using the cake and the rain as a metaphor for that. OK, it may be far out there, and a bit incomprehensible, but I wrote the song at a time in the late 1960s when surrealistic lyrics were the order of the day." The love affair Webb speaks of was with Suzy Horton, who in 1993 married Linda Ronstadt's cousin, Bobby. Said Webb (in the Los Angeles Times), "MacArthur Park was where we met for lunch and paddleboat rides and feeding the ducks. She worked across the street at a life insurance company. Those lyrics were all very real to me - there was nothing psychedelic about it to me. The cake, it was an available object. It was what I saw in the park at the birthday parties. But people have very strong reactions to the song. There's been a lot of intellectual venom."

Are you convinced there's more to this song than Jimmy Webb is letting on? You might be right. The staff music composer Colin McCourt used to work for the publisher of this song, Edwin. H. Morris. McCourt claims Webb explained to him the song's meaning - cake in the rain and all. He told The Daily Mail April 2, 2011: "Jim was in love with a girl who left him. Months later, he heard she was getting married - in the park. Broken hearted, he went to the wedding and, not wanting to be seen, hid in a gardener's shed. As the open-air ceremony was taking place, it started to pour with rain and the rain running down the shed window made the cake look as if it was melting. Interestingly, the man who married the girl was a phone engineer from Wichita - inspiration for another of Jim's hits?" One thing for sure: When Webb found out Suzy Horton was getting married, it inspired him to write "Worst That Could Happen."

Jimmy Webb, whose songwriting credits include "Up-Up and Away" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," wrote "MacArthur Park" in the summer of 1967. He offered it to Bones Howe, who produced The Association, for possible inclusion on the group's fourth album. Howe loved it, but The Association didn't want to devote that much space on the album to Webb's project, so they rejected it. The song went to Richard Harris, who delivered a lyrical interpretation that was filled with harpsichord (played by Webb) and changing tempo.