It's MacArthur Park time once again...

[Goonch]

4. 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."