Someone left a cake out in the rain and I don't think that I can take it cause it took so long to bake it and I'll never forget being asked to play that monster in the first bar I worked in. I may have taken a lot of hallucinogens back then but I knew that was some weird shit and I remember asking my boss (from where the request came)what she was going on about.
"MacArthur Park" was written and composed by Jimmy Webb in the summer and fall of 1967. The inspiration for the song was his relationship and breakup with Susie Horton, who later married David Ronstadt, a cousin of singer Linda Ronstadt. MacArthur Park, in Los Angeles, California, was where the two occasionally met for lunch and spent their most enjoyable times together. At that time (the middle of 1965), Horton worked for a life insurance company whose offices were located just across the street from the park. In an interview with Newsday magazine in October 2014, Webb explained:
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. … 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."