{"id":645,"date":"2024-09-02T15:24:08","date_gmt":"2024-09-02T15:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/?p=645"},"modified":"2024-09-02T15:25:54","modified_gmt":"2024-09-02T15:25:54","slug":"mm-9-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/2024\/09\/02\/mm-9-2\/","title":{"rendered":"MM &#8211; 9\/2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"MacArthur Park\" width=\"1140\" height=\"855\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/sD-zTwi3_GU?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-white-background-color has-background\">&#8220;MacArthur Park&#8221; was written and composed by&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jimmy_Webb\">Jimmy Webb<\/a>&nbsp;in the summer and fall of 1967 as part of an intended&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cantata\">cantata<\/a>. Webb brought the entire cantata to&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Association\">The Association<\/a>, but the group rejected it.&nbsp; <sup><\/sup>The inspiration for the song was his relationship and breakup with Susie Horton. &nbsp;<sup><\/sup><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/MacArthur_Park\">MacArthur Park<\/a>, in Los Angeles, was where the couple would occasionally meet for lunch and spent their most enjoyable times together.&nbsp; <sup><\/sup>At that time (the middle of 1965), Horton worked for&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Aetna\">Aetna<\/a> insurance, whose offices were across the street from the park.&nbsp; <sup><\/sup>When asked by interviewer&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Terry_Gross\">Terry Gross<\/a> what was going through his mind when he wrote the song&#8217;s lyrics, Webb replied that it was meant to be symbolic and referred to the end of a love affair.&nbsp; <sup><\/sup>In an interview with&nbsp;<em>Newsday<\/em>&nbsp;in October 2014, Webb explained:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-white-background-color has-background\">Everything in the song was visible. There&#8217;s nothing in it that&#8217;s fabricated. The old men playing&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Checkers\">checkers<\/a>&nbsp;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&#8217;s a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park&#8230;. Back then, I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.<sup><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-white-background-color has-background\">Webb and Horton remained friends, even after her marriage to another man. The breakup was also the primary influence for &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/By_the_Time_I_Get_to_Phoenix\">By the Time I Get to Phoenix<\/a>&#8220;, another song written and composed by Webb.<sup><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-white-background-color has-background\">The idea to write and compose a classically structured song with several movements that could be played on the radio came from a challenge by music producer&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bones_Howe\">Bones Howe<\/a>, who produced recordings for&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Association\">The Association<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;MacArthur Park&#8221; was written and composed by&nbsp;Jimmy Webb&nbsp;in the summer and fall of 1967 as part of an intended&nbsp;cantata. Webb brought the entire cantata to&nbsp;The Association, but the group rejected it.&nbsp; The inspiration for the song was his relationship and breakup with Susie Horton. &nbsp;MacArthur Park, in Los Angeles, was where the couple would occasionally [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civatar.com\/suziqsthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}