“I Breathe In, I Breathe Out”
Chris Cagle
Written by Chris Cagle and Jon Robbin
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
April 5, 2002
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
April 13, 2002
I’m happy Chris Cagle has a number one single to his credit. That’s a great achievement that some great country artists can’t claim as their own.
That’s about all I have to say about “I Breathe In, I Breathe Out,” a paint-by-numbers nineties country ballad that’s a few years past its expiration date. The expected components are all there, but we’ve seen this blueprint so many times before and it’s been done better, too. Heck, Rascal Flatts are about to do it better with their first No. 1 hit later this year.
The details are too vague and the performance is too flaccid for this one to linger in the memory for very long.
We’re reaching the days where even a No. 1 hit and two gold albums didn’t mean you’d have a sustainable career. I wonder how much great music we missed out on because so many young artists ended up cannon fodder for rapidly consolidating labels who were desperate to find the next superstar act. Cagle shows some promise here but he won’t get much of a chance to deliver on it.
“I Breathe In, I Breathe Out” gets a C.
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What surprised me most about Chris Cagle was not that he hit the top of the charts the same number of times as James Bonamy, but that his tenure of intermittent chart success spanned more than a dozen years! I never had anything against the guy, but I can’t think of any more clear cut example in my lifetime of somebody so anonymous parlaying his “lead singer from the local street dance band” vibe into a decade of hits…although admittedly Justin Moore has at this point likely exceeded him! Cagle wasn’t a heartthrob. His voice was average. His songwriting was average. It was always fascinating to me how managed to have this much success at this level.
As for “I Breathe In, I Breathe It”, it’s a good title for a break-up song. I’ll give it that. But I don’t think the remainder of the lyrics or the vocal performance lives up to the title. Everything about this song feels like a Rhett Akins album cut. I suspect its success is probably more about spillover momentum from “Laredo”, which I thought was Cagle’s best song. “What a Beautiful Day” was a minor pleasure too. Chris Cagle appeared at my county fair in 2013 and I didn’t even recognize him from the guy in this video, which is probably why my memory of him was not of a heartthrob. He felt like a has-been relic by the time he showed up at my county fair, and yet he was only one year removed from two top-20 hits!
Grade: C
Maybe in another world this guy got a chance to shine, and was better remembered, I never hear about Chris Cagle, even though he had a #1 hit, 9 Top 20 hits and 2 gold albums, more success than plenty of other singers! This song is pretty middle of the road, so a C feels right, not bad, not spectacular.
What does it say the first Chris Cagle song I heard (and my favorite so far) was the cover of “Don’t Ask Me No Questions” by Lynyrd Skynyrd he recorded for the Blue Collar Comedy Tour Movie? (but to be fair its a pretty damn good cover)
I hadn’theard him do this cover before. I like it!
My personal favorite Chris Cagle deep cut is “Look at What I’ve Done”. I’d have loved to see him take a chance on that one as a single.
This one I can see the flaws on, but he just feels too likable for anything to bring it down much. I will grant he has better singles down the line, and I’m amazed at how persistent he was.
Another victim of Nashville’s shredder. I thought that this song was worth a “B” and that he had potential; however, it seems that I was wrong.
Another interesting note: this song was only ever a bonus track, which might be why it lacked promotional push. It was also the first production credit I could find for Chris Lindsey, and it actually sounds *better* than most of his later production works.
I’d have loved for the “Anywhere but Here” album to have taken off, as all three singles off that project were stellar.
I agree that this song is forgettable. The only singles that I remember liking from him are “What a Beautful Day” and “What Kind of Gone.”