It flows better when Dionne sings it, can't find a video of it though, but...damn...this stuff just comes out of nowhere, and the lyrics are what grounds it as a song, I think.
Without those words, it's "just" a clever combination of melodic events (yeah, "just"...as if...)
"Now here I am, the last one to be loved"...DAMN, that's some strong stuff...you can't get there by just notes alone, not there.
I miss the days when a 45 could just make your world change in about 3:00, more or less. Thy were like little guerrilla raids masquerading as disposable commercial product...I guess they were both, but the notion that somebody would dare to put a song like this out for public consumption speaks to a collective courage and defiant optimism that has all but been sucked out of our world...or whatever.
Whatever, yeah, whatever. But this did happen, this off-the-wall popular music, and it was good. And Hal David was one of the ones who did it.