The Windmills of Your Mind

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My cover of one of my favorite songs from the 1960's, a unique and truly haunting song: The Windmills of Your Mind. I'm singing to a karaoke orchestral version of the song, based on a cover by Tina Arena. I've also made major changes to the lyrics, mainly to draw out the song's spiritual themes.

Like a circle in a spiral.
like a wheel within a wheel.
Never ending or beginning
on an ever spinning reel.
Like a snowball down a mountain,
or a carnival balloon.
Like a carousel that's turning,
running rings around the moon.
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
past the minutes of its face.
Like a living, growing planet
spinning silently in space.
Oh the whirling thoughts you find
in the windmills of your mind!

Like a tunnel that you follow
to a tunnel of its own,
down a hollow to a cavern
where the sun has never shone.
Like a door that keeps revolving
in a half-forgotten dream.
Or the ripples from a pebble
someone tossed into a stream.
Lovers walk along the ocean,
joining hearts and holding hands,
as the tide comes in behind,
erasing footprints in the sand.
Oh the whirling thoughts you find
in the windmills of your mind!

Toys that jingle in boy's pocket,
words that jangle in man's head
Why did summer go so quickly?
Now you’re living!
Now you’re dead!
And those windmills keep on turning
as we shuffle off this coil.
And the bardos that they conjure
feel so real our souls will boil.
Then we’re born again forgetting,
like a fragment of a song.
Half remembered names and faces,
but to whom do they belong?

Though the windmills pose as helpers,
they bind us to the wheel
of sweet dreams and dreaded nightmares
‘till we wake up to the Real.

'Till then. . .
thoughts turning in a spiral,
like a wheel within a wheel,
never ending or beginning,
on an ever spinning reel.
As the images unwind. . .
ah, the whirling dreams you find
in the windmills of your mind!

• Introduction
• Lyrics
  • Spiritual themes
  • The wheel within a wheel
  • The briefness of a human life
  • Reincarnation
  • What happens between death and re-birth
  • Spiritually better destinies
  • Our ultimate destiny
• Music
  • A very unusual song structure
  • Mozart and the song's melody
  • Musical build
  • The sound of the windmills turning
  • Changes to the arrangement
• More About This Song
  • The original lyrics
  • What was dropped from the lyrics
  • Noteworthy versions of the song

INTRODUCTION

The Windmills of Your Mind has always intrigued me because it is a very unusual song. That's why I wanted to do a cover of it. And that's why I'll now be doing a deep dive, as we explore this song together.

A bit about the origin of The Windmills of Your Mind. In 1968, Norman Jewison was directing a romantic heist film, The Thomas Crown Affair. He needed a song to accompany a scene where a glider makes several circles before landing. He commissioned Michel Legrand (music) and Alan and Marilyn Bergman (lyrics) to write the song. It was the post-Sergeant Pepper era, and psychedelic songs were the rage. So Jewison was using the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever as a temporary musical accompaniment for the scene, and he asked the songwriters to write something similarly psychedelic.

More about where the lyrics came from (from this article): "The lyrics they came up with had a psychedelic quality, and they were indeed influenced by a drug — but not LSD. 'When I was seven I had my tonsils out,' Marilyn Bergman told the Jewish Chronicle. 'As they gave me the ether, I remember this circular descent into a sleep state.' Alan Bergman, for his part, said he was trying to evoke a swirling feeling of anxiety 'and you can’t turn your brain off'."

As for the music: Legrand had a background as a jazz pianist and writing classical/jazz/orchestral movie scores, like the beautiful, well-known song, I Will Wait For You, in the French musical romance film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. (Connie Francis' English version of I Will Wait For You had given the song global recognition, and the song was nominated for the 1966 Academy Award for "Best Original Song".) So Legrand was not about to write an experimental, pop-rock song with a mellotron synthesizer, instruments/voices recorded backwards, etc. like The Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever. Nonetheless, Legrand's music for the song is unusual and musically unique, comprised of a single melody that is repeated over and over. I'll say much more about this a little later.

LYRICS

If you're familiar with the original song, you'll hear many lines in my lyrics that are familar, many lines that are new, and some lines that are familiar but are being used in a new way. I've included the original lyrics in a later section, for reference and comparison.

Spiritual themes. Most listeners are attracted to — and haunted by — the song's words, because they sound like they are pointing to something profound — even if the listener can't quite put their finger on what that is. Of course, not everyone agrees that there is anything profound present. English poet, Ian McMillan, wrote: "It's a fantastic song, but the words appear to mean something when they don't."

I've always loved both the music and the words. And I have a different take on the lyrics than McMillan's. To me, it feels like the songwriters were "channeling" something that was real but which they themselves didn't fully understand, and so only bits and pieces of recognizable meaning made it through intact. The rest is half there, suggestively, but not spelled out. But enough is there that, when listeners hear it, many recognize something that is true on a deep level (the level of half-fleshed out Jungian archetypes), and so they have a strong response to it, without knowing precisely why.

It has always seemed to me that there was a spiritual significance to what was trying to be communicated through this song. And so, in creating my version, I set out to re-write the song, in a way that would bring out and make clear and obvious the otherwise relatively obscure spiritual meanings.

This next part of my article will be somewhat unusual in that I have a rare opportunity to link two usually separate parts of my life and wear a couple of different "hats" as I write. Sometimes I will be writing as a songwriter and lyricist; and sometimes I will be writing as a spiritual author.

To me, the words to The Windmills of Your Mind hint at several key spiritual themes that appear in spiritual traditions (especially Eastern spiritual traditions):

• the briefness of a human life
• reincarnation
• what happens between death and re-birth
• spiritually better destinies
• our ultimate destiny

The wheel within a wheel. From a spiritual viewpoint, it becomes clear what the curious expression, "a wheel within a wheel" (or "circle in a spiral"), is about. The two wheels are the "ever-spinning" mind, and the wheel of birth and death that is reincarnation. Which wheel is inside the other depends on one's point of view. The song's description of the mind as "ever-spinning" is a double entendre. On the one hand, the windmill blades never stop turning. Even when we sleep, the mind keeps generating dreams (in "REM sleep"). The only break from the mind most people get is in deep sleep ("non-REM sleep"). On the other hand, as the machine of mind turns, it generates or "spins" (as in "weaves") an endless stream of mind forms: thoughts, images, etc. The "spiral" (of "a circle in a spiral") reflects the fact that one doesn't just merely go round in circles, lifetime after lifetime, on the wheel of birth and death; rather, one is slowly evolving or "raising one's vibration". Ultimately one is changing one's residence to increasingly higher, spiritual dimensions of Reality that are more "heavenly" than this material dimension.

The briefness of a human life. The briefness of a human life (and the ephemeral nature of everything in life, e.g., relationships, possessions, etc.) is a theme of all spiritual traditions, and mortality is a significant reason why people are interested in spirituality in the first place. The Bergmans have written many songs that focus on that theme, including The Way We Were and You Don't Bring Me Flowers (Anymore), so the appearance of that theme in this song by them is not too surprising.

The first place I focus on this theme is in these lines:

Lovers walk along the ocean,
joining hearts and holding hands,
as the tide comes in behind,
erasing footprints in the sand.

The original lines were:

Lovers walk along a shore
and leave their footprints in the sand

It was clear to me that "footprints in the sand" was a metaphor for how human relationships were passing and fleeting. But I felt that that same point could be made more powerfully by having the lovers walk along the shore, but then having the tide come in behind them and literally erase their footsteps — hence my re-write.

The next place I focus on this theme is in these lines:

Toys that jingle in boy's pocket,
words that jangle in man's head
Why did summer go so quickly?
Now you’re living!
Now you’re dead!

The original lines were:

Keys that jingle in your pocket,
words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly,
was it something that you said?

"Why did summer go so quickly?" is a metaphor for the briefness of a human life. I then changed the two lines before that line to serve the same purpose. The original lines simply contained a word association between "jingle" and "jangle". But by changing "your" to "boy's" in the first line (along with changing "keys" to "toys") and changing "your" to "man's" in the second line, suddenly these lines also become brief references to (or memories from) boyhood and manhood. The third line (why did summer go so quickly?) then becomes a comment on how swift that passage is, and the fourth and fifth lines in the new lyrics (both new lines) — now you're living; now you're dead — powerfully seal the deal with the awareness that life is over all too soon.

Reincarnation. The lyrics in my song on this theme are:

Then we’re born again forgetting,
like a fragment of a song.
Half remembered names and faces,
but to whom do they belong?

The original lyrics had the last three lines:

the fragment of a song.
Half remembered names and faces,
but to whom do they belong?

which are very mysterious without more context. However, because of my own research into spirituality, I made an immediate connection between the lines, "Half remembered names and faces, but to whom do they belong?" and studies done by Dr. Ian Stevenson, director of the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Division of Perceptual Studies, and one of the world's leading researchers in reincarnation (until his passing in 2007). In books like Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966), Dr. Stevenson's studies were based on the discovery that many young children seem to retain memories of a past life, which eventually are forgotten as they grow older and the current life dominates their awareness and feelings. He set up a global network of people who helped him locate such children before they had the chance to make contact with people in their past life. Then he would visit the child, obtain as much information as possible (enough to identify the place they believed they had lived in before), and then he'd go to that place, confirm the existence of the people described by the young child, learn more about who they had been and when they had died, and then he'd come back and quiz the young child again, based on information he now knew but the child couldn't possibly know (unless he or she was indeed the reincarnation of that other person). So Dr. Stevenson was in the business of tracking down these "half remembered names and faces" and finding out to whom they belonged — like the lines in the song. Over the course of his professional life, he documented thousands of such cases, creating a compelling body of evidence for reincarnation.

Once we consider the possibility of reincarnation, we can see many things in life which reincarnation can help explain, from deja vu experiences, to experiencing a strong connection to someone you've only just met in this lifetime (because of a "past-life connection"), child prodigies (who were masters of a particular skill or talent in their past lives), transgender people (who were a different gender in their last life), etc.

If reincarnation occurs, then a single human lifetime is only a very small piece of our entire personal history, a "fragment of a song", to express it in the beautiful, poetic manner of the song's lyrics.

To round out the verse on reincarnation, I added one more line:

Then we're born again, forgetting

One of the oddest things about reincarnation is that we don't generally remember our past lives (without the help of something like past-life regression). Dr. Stevenson's studies mitigate that somewhat, in that it seems many of us do remember some things for a while, as young children, and have that experience of "half-remembered names and faces, but to whom do they belong?" There are a number of explanations for why most of us forget, but that's beyond what I can explore in this short space.

What happens between death and re-birth. While we can amuse ourselves with the idea of reincarnation and past lives — "I think you were Cleopatra and I was Mark Antony" — it is a serious subject with many deep implications. The first implication for many of us is: relief — our existence doesn't just cease at death! But following right on that is the next big implication: something happens to us between when we die and when we are re-born. What exactly do we experience?

In what is perhaps the best-known of all the many familiar passages from Shakespeare, a soliloquy from Hamlet, the Bard leads us through a consideration about what happens to us after death:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die — to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

And so this passage from Shakespeare is what I'm alluding to in the second line of these lines:

And those windmills keep on turning
as we shuffle off this coil.
And the bardos that they conjure
feel so real our souls will boil.

"As we shuffle off this coil" is thus a Shakespearean reference to death and what lies beyond death. "Bardos" is a familiar term from Tibetan Buddhism referring to the states we pass through between death and re-birth. (The best source for learning more about the Tibetan view on bardos is The Tibetan Book of the Dead.) In the Western religious traditions, we have the concepts of Heaven and Hell for such after-life states or destinies, and they last forever. These notions of "Heaven" and "Hell" could be thought of as a reductionistic version of the "bardos", in which there are only two bardos: one is really wonderful and the other is really horrible. In the Tibetan view, there are a wide variety of possible states or bardos, not just two extremes, and none of these states last forever.

While the bardos (and certainly Heaven and Hell) are often thought of as fixed places, I'm going to return to Shakespeare to explore a different view. "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come. . . must give us pause." This is often interpreted as Shakespeare alluding to Heaven and Hell. But a careful read suggests otherwise.

"What dreams may come" — the obvious intrepretation is, when I die, my mind will live on, and my dreams are what is of concern. In what is probably the most comprehensive and profound book on what occurs after death, Easy Death, spiritual teacher, Adi Da, summarizes it this way: "When you're alive, you make mind. When you're dead, mind makes you." So, programmed by how we used our mind while alive, the mind spins dreams after we die which, like our dreams at night, we experience as real while we are dreaming them.

We can get a sense for what we may dream after death by examining what kinds of dreams we have at night, while alive. Some may be pleasant. Some may be nightmares.

Just as at night, those after-death dreams will feel real. But they will be much more intense emotionally. The physical dimension buffers a lot of that feeling intensity so we don't feel much of it while alive in physical form. But the astral dimensions we are in between lives are realms of pure mind, pure psyche, pure feeling, so everything is felt much more intensely.

In a physical body, we normally feel that there is a kind of barrier between what we think "inside" our head, and what we experience "outside" in the "objective" world. (Even though, as Adi Da puts it, the world is actually psycho-physical — what we experience in every moment is actually affected by what we are thinking and feeling, because the laws governing the "physical" universe are actually psycho-physical, involving both the physical world and the psyche, as quantum physics is beginning to discover.) But in the astral realms, there is no such sharp division between "inside" and "outside". What you think instantly manifests as the reality around you! (That's what Adi Da is referring to in writing, "When you're dead, mind makes you.") Also, when we have a nightmare while alive in physical form, we can always wake up. That option is no longer available in the astral realms, and the dreams go on until they run out of steam.

So now we can make sense of my lyrics:

And those windmills keep on turning
as we shuffle off this coil.
And the bardos that they conjure
feel so real our souls will boil.

The mind lives on after our body dies. The dreams it generates are so intense "our souls will boil".

Spiritually better destinies. So the "windmills of our mind" are not merely nuisances that sometimes give us insomnia. They are at the core of our personal destiny. They determine (and even generate) our experience between lives. The mind also is what determines where we end up in our re-birth. If we placed a significant amount of our attention on higher, spiritual realms during our human lifetime — not just toying with the idea of such realms (in the manner of "religious believers") but actually locating and visiting these realms, via profound meditation, for significant periods while alive (as, for example, saints or yogis report doing) — then we may be able to stably shift our residence to such a higher spiritual realm after death. But most of us are born right back here in the material dimension because, regardless of whether we believed in an after life or heaven and hell, our mind was focused, our entire life, on material fulfillment, material distraction, etc. (That material focus of the mind locks us into rebirth in the material dimension.)

Our ultimate destiny. Even if we attain these attain these spiritually more auspicious destinies — residing in more "heavenly" realms, with much longer lives, sweeter dreams, and fewer nightmares — we are still confined to the wheel within a wheel, still being ruled by the windmills of our mind. To put it another way: We are still dreaming — just better dreams, in a higher spiritual dimension, in a complex dream of a universe with many dimensions (material and spiritual).

We all are now familiar with notions like this (where reality is not what it seems, and we only find out what is real by "waking up"), through movies like The Matrix (where you "wake up" by taking a red pill). But the story of The Matrix is a typical science fiction dystopia, where the actual reality you wake up to is a horrible one, in which malevolent AI's are in control and have enslaved humankind.

In the understanding of Eastern spiritual traditions, awakening from the dream is our ultimate destiny, setting us free from the dreams spun by the windmills of our collective minds. In those traditions, the entire universe (with its material and spiritual dimensions) is arising in a single Consciousness (aka "God", the "Self", etc.) in the manner of a dream. None of us have actual independent consciousness or existence, any more than the characters in our dreams at night have independent existence. All kinds of adventures within this incredible, immensely complex dream are possible, including profound spiritual ordeals that lead us to reside in more benign spiritual dimensions. But the only ultimate freedom comes from waking up from the dream altogether, and restoring our True Identity as the infinite, unlimited Consciousness dreaming it all. To be standing as that Divine Consciousness is to be in an eternal state of Perfect Happiness and Infinite Being. (The Buddhist term, nirvana, means cessation of vana, which means both "desire" and the otherwise endless weaving/spinning/generation of mind forms by those windmills.) So this possibility of waking up altogether from the endless dreams being generated by the windmills of our minds is the meaning of these lines:

Though the windmills pose as helpers,
they bind us to the wheel
of sweet dreams and dreaded nightmares
‘till we wake up to the Real.

While the lyrics of the original song only describe or hint at the downside of being trapped in the wheel of mind and the cycle of life and death, that picture by itself is incomplete and unnecessarily negative. This is both because there is a way to experience much better dreams (by doing what it takes to "move to" a higher, better spiritual dimension), and also because there is a way to wake up altogether, to unlimited, unconditional Happiness. So I made sure my version of this song balanced out the picture by providing these lines that point the way to final and complete freedom from the windmills of our minds.

MUSIC

A very unusual song structure. Michel Legrand had a background as a jazz pianist and writing classical/jazz/orchestral movie scores, like the beautiful, well-known song, I Will Wait For You, in the French musical romance film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. (Connie Francis' English version of I Will Wait For You had given the song global recognition, and the song was nominated for the 1966 Academy Award for "Best Original Song".) So Legrand was not about to write an experimental, pop-rock song with a mellotron synthesizer, instruments/voices recorded backwards, etc. like The Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever. Nonetheless, Legrand's music for the song is unusual and musically unique. The song does not have the usual verse / chorus structure. Instead, a single melodic line:

is repeated over and over again, with different chords (whose shifts are largely dictated by the circle of fifths), and where the notes are moved up or down slightly to mesh with the changing chords. And the repeated words that function something like a brief chorus:

Like the circles that you find
in the windmills of your mind

are set to a melody constructed from the last seven notes of that same repeated melodic line. So the song is truly a masterpiece in musical parsimony!

And the musical "shape" of the song, as it follows the circle of fifths and repeats the same melody at higher or lower levels is a spiral. The first section of lyrics follows suit, overtly beginning with the words "round", "like a circle in a spiral", "like a wheel within a wheel", and then giving one circular image after another, such as "like a clock whose hands are sweeping", "the world is like an apple whirling silently in space", etc. So both words and music have this overarching theme: "the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind".

Mozart and the song's melody. It is very likely that the song's melody was inspired by the slow movement in Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante in E-Flat Major, K. 364: II; Andante. This is immediately apparent when you listen to the opening of the Mozart piece:

The song gained recognition as soon as the movie was released, winning the 1968 Academy Award for "Best Original Song". In 2004, it was ranked #57 in the American Film Institute's "100 Years...100 Songs" survey of top songs in American cinema.

Musical build. From one viewpont, The Windmills of Your Mind is a series of images without a unifying story; and it has a single melodic line that is repeated over and over. You can see how it could easily become very boring! So in general, to hold the listener's interest for the duration of the song, the arrangement requires a good "musical build", that is, a way of steadily increasing the intensity of the music throughout the course of the song.

The original movie version of the song (sung by Noel Harrison) did not have any "musical build". But it was sung very quickly, so it didn't really need to hold the listener's attention for very long. (Plus, people were also watching a movie, not just listening to the song by itself.) In contrast, Dusty Springfield's version was an actual pop song release, and so it did require a musical build to hold the listener's attention and interest. And the folks who arranged the song did a brilliant job at it — virtually all musical builds for the song created since use Dusty Springield's version as their inspiration. Her version starts off quietly and contemplatively, accompanying the series of circle-related images that comprise the beginning of the song. There is no percussion. Then the song builds in intensity, starting what I think of as a "demented bossa nova". I say "demented" because usually a bossa nova is light and breezy and is in a major key (think The Girl From Ipanema).But here, the song is anything but light and breezy. And yet, somehow the bossa nova accompaniment works anyway. The percussion starts off as a light cymbal ding, and gradually grows in intensity, until it becomes a full-fledged rock rhythm near the end of the song.

The arrangement I'm using in my version (based on Tina Arena's 2007 cover of the song) is like Dusty Springfield's 1968 version, but with a more modern sound. Also the full-fledged rock rhythm starts much earlier, at the start of the bossa nova.

Changes to the arrangement. By and large I really love the karaoke arrangement based on Tina Arena's version of the song. Humorously, the only things I don't like about her version are the beginning and the end! Her version begins with an upward guitar slide:

I don't know why I dont like that sound, but in fact I cringe whenever I hear it. So I replaced it with a more contemplative sound — a sustained note on the bassoon:

Songs often end either suddenly and dramatically, or they repeat and fade out. Strangely, it seemed Tina Marie's arrangers wanted to have it both ways! Which, to me, feels pretty wishy-washy, musically:

In addition, it just seems obvious the "repeat and fade" style ending is the obvious choice for this song, because the song is about a "never-ending wheel". So I changed the ending to purely "repeat and fade", also echoing the word "mind" to indicate that the mind keeps spinning endlessly:

MORE ABOUT THIS SONG

The original lyrics. Here are the original lyrics to the song:

Round
like a circle in a spiral,
like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain,
or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning
running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple
whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
in the windmills of your mind!
Like a tunnel that you follow
to a tunnel of its own
Down a hollow to a cavern
where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
in a half-forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
someone tosses in a stream
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple
whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
in the windmills of your mind!
Keys that jingle in your pocket,
words that jangle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly,
was it something that you said?
Lovers walk along a shore
and leave their footprints in the sand
Is the sound of distant drumming
just the fingers of your hand?
Pictures hanging in a hallway
and the fragment of a song
Half remembered names and faces,
but to whom do they belong?
When you knew that it was over
you were suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
to the color of her hair!
Like a circle in a spiral,
like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
on an ever-spinning reel
As the images unwind,
like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind!

What was dropped from the lyrics. In order to be able to add as much as I did to the lyrics without making the song longer, I had to drop some lines too. One easy "drop" was the repetition of the lines:
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple
whirling silently in space
They already were sung once, so I added new lines where the second repetition used to be.

A second set of lines that I dropped were these ones:
When you knew that it was over
you were suddenly aware
That the autumn leaves were turning
to the color of her hair!
First of all, it seems to be alluding to a relationship that hasn't even been mentioned elsewhere, now being "over" — and that feels like a unnecessary diversion in a song where every line counts. Then the rest of the lines seem to allude to that same theme of "the brevity of a human lifetime" — autumn leaves and people aging — and the mind's ability to free-associate between the two. . . which is all very nice, but we've already touched on this (in more powerful ways) in the song, and can put the space to better use. Indeed, starting with Noel Harrison's original version, the music slows dramatically during these lines, as though what was being said is the climax or the most important point of the song. But it isn't! It's just an interesting free association of the mind. However, I used the lines I freed up (and the accompanying dramatic slowdown in the music) to communicate what is the climax or most important point of my version of the song: that there is a way off the otherwise ever spinning wheel:
Though the windmills pose as helpers,
they bind us to the wheel
of sweet dreams and dreaded nightmares
‘till we wake up to the Real.

I dropped:
Is the sound of distant drumming just the fingers of your hand?
It's nice, but it's just one more example of the mind's ability to free-associate, and we already have a lot of that.

Finally, I dropped the word, "Round", at the beginning because it seems completely superfluous, lyrically (we'll have plenty of circles, spirals, wheels, etc. later in the lyrics), and very odd, musically.

I also made a few changes that are more "edits" than "drops". For example, I changed:
And the world is like an apple
whirling silently in space
to:
Like a living, growing planet
spinning silently in space.

Noteworthy versions of this song. Because of the recognition gained by the song and because of the unusual nature of the song's words and music, over the years it became a standard, covered by hundreds of singers and instrumental arrangements. I'll note several versions in particular, either because they are historical antecedents of my version, or because I found them striking in some way:

• Noel Harrison — This was the orchestral/pop version that accompanied the scene in the 1968 movie, The Thomas Crown Affair. It's nice but sung way too fast to allow the listener to really feel the song.(Presumably it was sung so fast — 2 minutes and 22 seconds, in contrast with Dusty Springfield's 3 minutes and 51 seconds! — to fit the short length of the scene.)
• Dusty Springfield — This pop-rock version was released immediately after the song won the 1968 Oscar for "Best Original Song". Until that confirmation of the song, Dusty Springfield was reluctant to release her version, because, even though she sang it well, she couldn't identify with the song's words. This version and Noel Harrison's are probably the most familiar versions of the song.
• Sting — This was the version used in the 1999 remake of the movie, The Thomas Crown Affair. It's very jazzy, and doesn't have the musical build of Dusty Springfield's version; so it completely hinges on Sting's ability as a singer to mesmerize, and hold the listener's attention for the entire length of the song. Fortunately that's one of Sting's fortés as a singer, as he demonstrated repeatedly in songs like Every Breath You Take and Fields of Gold which, without Sting's ability to mesmerize listeners, would have quickly bored the average listener through the repetitiveness of these songs.
• Tina Arena — This is the version my karaoke arrangement is based on. It's not her voice but the musical arrangement backing her that stood out for me. Her 2007 version uses Dusty Springfield's version as its jumping off place, but it has a more contemporary musical sound, owing to all the advances in music that occurred between 1969 and 2007. I should note that, even though the karaoke version I use is based on Tina Arena's version, it's not identical. In fact, the karaoke creators invested some creativity in their version, and I like the result better than the actual arrangement used by Tina Arena.
• Michel Legrand — This little-known 1969 version is the songwriter singing his own song in a particularly heart-felt manner and with real panache.
• Johnny Mathis — From 1969. I include his version simply because he has an incredible voice.
• Barbra Streisand — From 2011. So does she. She also has unique connections with the songwriters, who wrote the musical score for her 1983 movie, Yentl. The Bergmans also co-wrote (with Neil Diamond) her songs, You Don't Bring Me Flowers and (with Marvin Hamlisch) The Way We Were.
• The Swingle Singers — Alan Bergman described the melody of the song as "a long baroque melody". There is no version that better brings out the Baroque character of the melody than this one (from 1975), with all its Bach-like choral counterpoint.
• George Robert — There are a zillion instrumental versions of the song out there, but this one from 2016, featuring saxaphonist George Robert, is truly exquisite.
• Take 6 — A fantastic, jazzy a capella version (from 2011).