I love the Abbey Lincoln version of ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’. She approaches the song with a Coltrane-ish modal feel, creating a lot of space for the rhythm section, and Joe Lovano’s tenor. The lyrics are really interesting. It seems to be a song about memory, regret and dreams. There is an impressionistic quality to the array of images and a free associative way of linking these together. The killer couplet comes towards the end – “When you knew that it was over in the autumn of goodbyes/For a moment you could not recall the colour of his eyes”. The portentous quality that has been building all the way through reaches a catharsis at this moment. There is a big perfect cadence in the tonic minor, which follows a long sequence using a lot of fifth relationships, where for a while there is the possibility of a major key resolution. In this moment the true meaning of the song seems to be revealed. It’s about loss, perhaps even about death, and everything we have heard up to this point is revealed as fragmented memories, swirling around and seeming to appear at random. The cycle of fifths is also a clever musical allusion to this symbolic circularity, giving the impression of unending movement, along with eternal returns.
The other day I looked up the lyrics. Can’t remember why, maybe the song was just buzzing around my head (so to speak) – it’s very catchy. To my surprise, instead of the portentous couplet there were the lines ‘When we knew that it was over you were suddenly aware/that the autumn leaves were turning to the colour of her hair’. This was worrying. I looked up a number of different versions of the lyrics, all the same stuff about leaves and hair colour, except for the Dusty Springfield version, which had my treasured lines. Then I listened to some different versions on Youtube, including the Dusty Springfield one. She sings it beautifully, a cleaner more commercial sound than Abbey Lincoln’s jazz version, but still great. Then ‘the autumn leaves were turning to the colour of his hair’. I couldn’t find the Abbey Lincoln lines in any other version. They’re not just better lines, for me they had become the whole point of the song, the denouement. And it just doesn’t work. You wouldn’t notice wistfully that autumn leaves were turning to the colour of someone’s hair (leaving aside the racial implications of the line, which may have been important for Abbey). Autumn leaves are all different colours, even the leaves on one tree. The whole idea is bullshit. Now forgetting the colour of someone’s eyes – that I can imagine. I can imagine how devastating that could be, how the feeling that we knew someone could be dreadfully undermined by this sudden realisation, contained within it the suggestion that there may be many other things about that person that we didn’t know, or which had slipped away from our failing memory of them.
I finished working with a client, an 8-year-old boy with a history of trauma and ‘difficult’ home life, in a school with many similar children. This was several years ago now. For the final session I suggested that we record something as a memento of our time together. I promised to make a CD of the improvised piece and to give it to him when I was back in school later that week. This felt like a fitting way to end our final session, being creative together, and producing something meaningful, which he might perhaps refer back to, treasure even. Later that week I went to his class room to give him the CD. I handed it to him. He stood there and fixed my gaze. He continued staring right into my eyes, unmoving, holding the CD. I was filled with a sense that this ending had been abrupt, inadequate, that the ‘good’ ending had been for my benefit whilst in reality he was feeling abandoned. My lovely creative ending was an empty gesture. This moment transformed the final session which had happened two days before, decimated my convenient narrative. Since then I have found consolation in Adam Phillips assertion, paraphrasing Valéry, that therapy ‘is never finished, only abandoned’. This is, of course the reverse of my ‘Windmills of Your Mind’, experience. I started with the lame version, and this client gave me the killer couplet, the REAL version, the one with meaning. We lose people, and no two versions are the same, but the one that stares reality in the face, unblinking, that’s the best one, in art and in life, and in music therapy, which is somewhere in the overlap between the two.
