Windmills of Your Mind is a simple, wistful song from the 1968 movie The Thomas Crown Affair, with music by Michel Legrand and lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman.
The lyrics aren't that remarkable—after all, these are the folks who gave us the following lines:
What are you doing for the rest of your life?
The north and south and east and west of your life?
… but they're not awful, either. They present a simple meditation on time endlessly rolling on, and the memory of passionately-felt emotions.
An instrumental version of this song is the first piece of music qua music I recall hearing, on the radio in my dad's car, sometime in the summer of 1972. I'm almost positive it was a Saturday, and probably shortly after 5:00. The memory is that vivid. I'd heard nursery songs and television jingles before that, but not music for the sake of music. I'm glad that it was as good a melody as this one was.
The majority of the melody comes from mutating this theme:
The phrase as a whole rises or falls, the relative distance between the initial two notes and the others grows or narrows, and the three-note figure at the end sometimes scoops down like it does here, or goes straight up or down; but the basic rhythmic phrase stays the same throughout 90% of the tune. The song goes through several mini-modulations to add variation. For a roughly two-minute pop piece, there's a good amount of harmonic motion going on.
I've been learning it on guitar. I don't have the music, so I've been checking my rendition by ear against this one by Noel Harris. Others exist that try to wring out as much pathos from the lyrics, but I feel that his rendition, very controlled in terms of dynamics and phrasing, gets out of the way and lets the music speak for itself.
cheers,
Adam
