What I Couldn't Leave Behind by Neil Loewe

I got on a 707 and flew to London and started doing this record with Richard. Love, Richard.' And it was the first time I was ever out of the country.

So one day I got a telegram over at my house on Camino Palmero that said, 'Dear Jimmy Webb, come London, make record. And we were just kind of tossing around that thing about, 'Wow, one of these days we ought to make a record.' And I used to say that to everybody, I'd say that to a cab driver. In our off-time we used to like to play the piano backstage and sing and have a few beers, and Richard and I got to be really good friends. Robinson, Mia Farrow and some other people, and I was doing music. We were doing like an anti-war pageant with Walter Pidgeon, Edward G. Explaining how he got together with the actor, Webb told Songfacts, 'I met Richard on stage at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles. Webb produced this song for Richard Harris, crossing the Atlantic Ocean several times in the process. There's been a lot of intellectual venom.' But people have very strong reactions to the song. It was what I saw in the park at the birthday parties. Those lyrics were all very real to me - there was nothing psychedelic about it to me.

She worked across the street at a life insurance company. Said Webb (in the Los Angeles Times), 'MacArthur Park was where we met for lunch and paddleboat rides and feeding the ducks. The love affair Webb speaks of was with Suzy Horton, who in 1993 married Linda Ronstadt's cousin, Bobby. 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.' 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. MacArthur Park is a real park in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, but that's about the only tangible reference. With the famous 'cake out in the rain,' this is one of the more lyrically intriguing songs ever recorded.

What I Couldn't Leave Behind by Neil Loewe