Could somebody please explain the lyrics to “MacArthur Park”?
I’m sure this topic has already been done to death, but a coupe searches yielded nothing. And I’d appreciate it if someone could explain that.
I searched out data base for “MacArthur Park” and got 67 hits, many of which pointed to Worst Song type threads. Here is one in which the lyrics are discussed.
Haj
A Google seach for “MacArthur Park lyrics” turned up this quote from Jimmy Webb who wrote the song:
I always think that whatever is art, need not and should not be explained, as someone once said. "But I’ll tell you: MacArthur Park is 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 that is what I was trying to get at. I suppose the whole thing was that I wrote the song at a time in the late 1960s when surrealistic lyrics were the order of the day. It was written around about the same time as Strawberry Fields, so it probably seems a bigger deal now than it was back then. Still, the lyrics never stopped Richard Harris, Frank Sinatra, Donna Summer and any number of trash garage bands from doing it - and who else can say that about one of their songs?
Haj