Dusty Springfield – "The Windmills of Your Mind" (1969)

Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning

“The Windmills of Your Mind” was written for the 1968 movie, The Thomas Crown Affair, which starred Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway.  Noel Harrison sang it on the movie soundtrack.

When Atlantic Records president Jerry Wexler heard the song, he thought it was perfect for Dusty Springfield, who had just signed a contract with his label.  (Dusty didn’t want to record it – according to her manager, “Dusty always said she hated it because she couldn't identify with the words.”)  

The original plan was to use it as a B-side, but that plan was thrown out the window when “The Windmills of Your Mind” won the Oscar for Best Song in April 1969.  The next morning, Atlantic Records mailed out 2500 promotional copies of the record to radio stations around the country.  

“The Windmills of Your Mind” was released
on the 1969 album, Dusty in Memphis

A couple of weeks later, “The Windmills of Your Mind” entered the Billboard “Hot 100” at #99.  It peaked at #31 a few weeks later.

A #31 record isn’t exactly a sharp stick in the eye, but it’s nothing to write home about – especially if you’re a recording artists with three top ten singles (“Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “You Don’t have to Say You Love Me,” and “Son of a Preacher Man”) to your credit.

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The music for “The Windmills of Your Mind” was written by the prolific French film composer, Michel Legrand, who later won Academy Awards for Best Original Score for Summer of ’42 and Yentl.

The song’s English lyrics were written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the husband-and-wife songwriting team best known for “The Way We Were.”

The music and words of “The Windmills of Your Mind” complement each other perfectly.  The lyrics present one image after another of things that go in circles – a carousel, a revolving door, the hands of a clock, an orbiting planet – and eventually end up right back where they started, while the music swirls and spins and chases its own tail.

Marilyn and Alan Bergman
flank Michel Legrand

The song’s arrangement is a tour de force – it starts off slowly, intensifies, recedes, and intensifies again.  (I think Legrand was the arranger as well as the composer.)

Dusty’s voice is warm and full of mystery and a little schizophrenic – at times, it sounds as if she recorded the vocal track having no idea what the orchestral accompaniment was going to sound like.  

“The Windmills of Your Mind” is somewhat disorienting – listening to it may make you feel a bit uneasy.  One writer said the song “occupies a singular place in the pop canon where psychedelia and easy listening meet,” and I’m not sure the world was a ready for a record that mixed and matched those two very dissimilar genres.  It doesn’t surprise me that it wasn’t a bigger hit.  

“The Windmills of Your Mind” may not be your cup of tea, but I think it’s quite extraordinary. 

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Dusty Springfield was born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien in the West Hampstead area of London in 1939.

She was given the nickname “Dusty” when she was a child.  In 1960, she and her older brother Tom formed a pop-folk group called the Springfields.  (They picked the name while rehearsing in a field during springtime.)  

The Springfields broke up in 1963.  Tom became a producer and songwriter – he co-wrote “Georgy Girl” for the Seekers – while Dusty became one of the most successful female recording artists of the sixties.

But she wasn’t as successful as she was deserved to be.  

Jason Ankeny of Allmusic described her as:

[T]he finest white soul singer of her era, a performer of remarkable emotional resonance whose body of work spans the decades and their attendant musical transformations with a consistency and purity unmatched by any of her contemporaries . . . . [T]he sultry intimacy and heartbreaking urgency of [her] voice transcended image and fashion, embracing everything from lushly orchestrated pop to gritty R&B to disco with unparalleled sophistication and depth.

Elton John called her “the greatest white singer there ever has been. . . . [E]very song she sang, she claimed as her own.”

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Click here to listen to Dusty Springfield’s recording of “The Windmills of Your Mind.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: