The Windmills of Your Mind

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Windmills of Your Mind is a song with words and music by Alan, Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand and performed by Noel Harrison for the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1968, as performed by the late singer Dusty Springfield, whose version of the song is most well known, despite being remade by singers such as Sting, whose version was used in the 1999 remake of the same film. Dusty Springfield's version appears on the soundtrack to Breakfast on Pluto (2006).

The song illustrates a person's mental state after a romantic break-up, relating the way emotionally charged thoughts and memories can run in tortured circles. With its succession of similes ("Like a circle in a spiral/Like a wheel within a wheel"), hypnotic rythms and complex imagery, it is a song that can "stick in your head." The lyrics even refer to this phenomenon: in among a collection of disjointed memories is "a fragment of a song," in the 1968 recording, and "a fragment of this song," in the 1999 recording.

The line "That the autumn leaves were turning to the color of her hair" is generally altered to the opposite gender when the song has been sung by a woman.

The song was featured in a skit in an episode of The Muppet Show, being sung faster and faster until catastrophe ensued.

[edit] External links

• Sting Lyrics - Windmills of Your Mind Lyrics
• The Windmills Of Your Mind by Noel Harrison at Songfacts
• Entry in The Muppet Wiki about a performance on The Muppet Show.

Preceded by "Talk to the Animals" from Doctor Dolittle

Academy Award for Best Original Song 1968

Succeeded by "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid