While the major/minor sad/happy comparisons are often the case, there are plenty of exceptions.

Take Sergei Rachmaninoff's "Vocalise" written in C#m. There are no words, it's beautiful, it's even hopeful, it's definitely not sad, and it's in a minor key.

As far as MacArthur park is concerned, I love the Richard Harris version and don't care for the Donna Summer disco version (Donna is great but that one didn't make it for me).

It's a Jimmy Webb composition and it seems to be about the end of a love affair, and for that the stress and angst of the Richard Harris version fits the song.

So I googled this and it seems that Jimmy was broken up about a girl he was in love with (Linda Ronstadt's cousin) who dumped him.

From Songfacts:

Are you convinced there's more to this song than Jimmy Webb is letting on? You might be right. The staff music composer Colin McCourt used to work for the publisher of this song, Edwin. H. Morris. The head of the company was a friend of Jimmy Webb, who once explained to him the song's meaning - cake in the rain and all. McCourt told The Daily Mail April 2, 2011: "Jim was in love with a girl who left him. Months later, he heard she was getting married - in the park. Broken-hearted, he went to the wedding and, not wanting to be seen, hid in a gardener's shed.

As the open-air ceremony was taking place it started to pour with rain and the rain running down the shed window made the cake look as if it was melting.

Interestingly, the man who married the girl was a phone engineer from Wichita - inspiration for another of Jim's hits?

Of course, songfacts has been wrong before so take that with a dose of salt.

Also from Songfacts:

Jimmy Webb, who wrote the song, explained in Q magazine: "It's clearly about a love affair ending, and the person singing it is using the cake and the rain as a metaphor for that. OK, it may be far out there, and a bit incomprehensible, but I wrote the song at a time in the late 1960s when surrealistic lyrics were the order of the day."

The love affair Webb speaks of was with Susan Ronstadt, Linda Ronstadt's cousin. Said Webb (in the Los Angeles Times), "MacArthur Park was where we met for lunch and paddleboat rides and feeding the ducks. She worked across the street at a life insurance company. Those lyrics were all very real to me; there was nothing psychedelic about it to me. The cake, it was an available object. It was what I saw in the park at the

So as not to hijack this thread, in the Donna Summer version the words don't fit the mood of the song.

Neil Sedaka's original fast version of "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do" is another that doesn't fit, but when he re-recorded a slow, moody version it works with the words.

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