oldhollywood:

Noel Harrison - Windmills of Your Mind (via The Thomas Crown Affair: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) 

“The original script called for Crown (Steve McQueen) to go sky-diving as a release from his post-robbery tension. I changed skydiving to glider-flying. The scene was simple, just a glider drifting and rolling against the blue sky. As we were shooting it, I knew it would need a particular kind of song behind it, something like the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields.

Michel Legrand produced a melody that was, like Strawberry Fields, on the baroque side. Listening to the melody, one had a sense that it would go on forever, just like the flight of the glider. Alan & Marilyn Bergman picked up on this quality in their lyrics. The images they conceived were all circular: “Like a snowball down the mountain / Or a carnival balloon / Like a carousel that’s turning/ Runnings rings around the moon.” The song was called The Windmills of Your Mind and I loved it.

-excerpted from This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me by Norman Jewison.