Tilting at windmills Cervantes wrote and published "Don Quixote" during the Eighty Years' War, or Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), a revolt by the Habsburg Netherlands to end Spanish rule. In "Don Quixote", the eponymous protagonist consistently misinterprets the motives and actions of his adversaries and allies, and struggles to even understand his own at times — a conundrum regularly resulting in apparently unjustified violent actions and consequences. One way of interpreting Don Quixote's tilting at windmills could be allegorically, thereby promoting critical, skeptical, or satirical evaluation of either a hero's motives, rationales and actions, or the ultimate aims of a nation's foreign
The Windmills of Your Mind Sound Studio in Memphis, problems with getting the proper chords down arose, and at Springfield's suggestion the song was arranged so the first three verses were sung in a slower tempo than the original film version. In April 1969 the third A-side release from "Dusty in Memphis" was announced as "I Don't Want to Hear It Anymore" with "The Windmills of Your Mind" as B-side: however Wexler was prepared to promote "Windmills" as the A-side if it won the Oscar for Best Song, reportedly instructing mail-room clerks at Atlantic Records' New York City headquarters to listen to the Academy Awards