Post by NJtoTX on Jun 10, 2017 12:36:56 GMT
Jimmy Webb -
"It's just a song about a girlfriend of mine, Susie Horton, and this place on Wilshire Boulevard where we used to have lunch, which is called MacArthur Park. And the truth is that everything in the song was visible. There's nothing in it that's fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. And so it's a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park.
"And I remember that that was also when I wrote 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix' because this affair was winding down to a kind of dreary close, and I was thinking, 'Well, I'll just go back to Oklahoma,' and so I wrote 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix.' Of course, I never even got in the car and turned on the engine to go back to Oklahoma. But it's related to 'MacArthur Park' in that sense. It comes from the same period when I was experiencing things and pretty much transferring them immediately into music."
"And I remember that that was also when I wrote 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix' because this affair was winding down to a kind of dreary close, and I was thinking, 'Well, I'll just go back to Oklahoma,' and so I wrote 'By the Time I Get to Phoenix.' Of course, I never even got in the car and turned on the engine to go back to Oklahoma. But it's related to 'MacArthur Park' in that sense. It comes from the same period when I was experiencing things and pretty much transferring them immediately into music."
