Given this is a cakey time of year perhaps not so surprising then that I woke up the other morning humming MacArthur Park. A song I haven’t heard for ages and one I always (mis)understood to be a heartfelt lament about a baking disaster.

‘MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
’cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again … ‘

After waking up to the tune of MacArthur Park I clicked on Spotify to hear the actual song rather than my garbled remembering of it. It’s been recorded by lots of artists, but the two best-know renditions are probably Richard Harris’s 1968 interpretation and Donna Summer’s a decade later.

Fist thing I notice is Jimmy Webb’s composition is musically quite complex. And the song is actually about a relationship break up. Donna Summer’s disco version hits the high notes and that works. Richard Harris kind of acts it—and that works too,

There is a MacArthur Park in Los Angeles; and in a 2014 interview Jimmy Webb explained that the lyrics recorded what he saw in the park where he and the ex used to meet for lunch. Yes, there was green icing, there was a cake, and yes, it was rain-soaked. The missing recipe represented lost love. Or something like that.

For me though, MacArthur Park will always be about the cake.

There are myriad songs abut alcohol (UB40, Red Wine; Chumbawamba’s fabulous Tubthumping) and drugs (Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit; The Velvet Underground, Heroine). And there are songs whose titles sound as if they might be about food, but aren’t. American Pie, for example, and The Beatles’ Strawberry Fields Forever, which is about a tough childhood. But a little light Googling and I found a surprising number of musicians singing about the consoling delights of cake, especially chocolate cake (Crowded House, Melissa Etheridge, and many others). And of course there’s the the deliciously named Melbourne band My Friend the Chocolate Cake, whose music I’ve always liked.

I find green icing unappealing, a bit kids’ birthday partyish, but after listening to a stack of cake-related songs, MacArthur Park remains my favourite. Although I do have a soft spot for Johnny Cash’s Strawberry Cake, a ballad about a hungry homeless guy in New York who steals a huge cake from a ritzy hotel.