"Breathe Out, Breathe In"

Backdated, archival post

[link to original on tumblr]

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A couple months ago, I started yet an-other project in which I copy out song lyrics as they're written in the liner notes (for whatever albums that make them available, not just those that fall under this project).  They have a degree of authority, so while there might be some differences between what's actually sung and what's written, I thought it'd be helpful to have an easily accessible file of them.

This morning, I started copying out the lyrics to Breathe Out, Breathe In, and I noticed something about the title track that I'd been completely oblivious to when just listening to it.

The second verse starts with the lines "Won't you look at the evening / Spread out to the sky."  I think this might be a reference to T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which starts:  "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky."  Both have "the evening… spread out to/against the sky."  (Also, both have - in sections, at least - first person plural pronouns ["we" and "us"].)  If that's not a quotation of T.S. Eliot, it's an incredible coincidence because "the evening spread out to the sky" is not such a common phrase.