“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.
Before the 2001 Capitol re-issue, I actually remember seeing the original Virgin copies of Cagle’s debut album, Play It Loud, on the shelves at Best Buy in 2000 with the original cover being a close up of Cagle wearing sunglasses. My personal favorite non-single from that album is “The Safe Side.”
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.”
Chris Cagle has never been an artist I’ve been the most enthusiastic about, especially as it got later into his career, but I do really like this song, plus a few more of his earlier hits.
When Cagle first came along with rockin’ cuts like “My Love Goes On and On,” and “Laredo,” he seemed like sort of a “turbo” or harder rocking version of Tim McGraw. Even my dad made a comment about his presence on stage being similar to McGraw’s after seeing the video for “…On And On” on TV in 2000. But then when I first saw the video for “I Breathe In, I Breathe Out” in late 2001, it really surprised me to be hearing such a mid 90s sounding ballad coming from Cagle after he had established himself with the two previous rockers. For me, it was a pleasant surprise, since I was actually loving and revisiting a lot of mid 90s country around late 2001, and it was always neat to hear a new song that still had that “old” style. Even the video looked like a throwback to 90s country videos with the “singer walking through a small town” concept. Cagle’s vocals on the song reminded me of a combination of Tracy Lawrence and Clay Walker, and I remember when I started hearing it regularly on the radio, the way he would sing the last “and breathe ouuuuuuuut” at the end of the song always reminded me of Lawrence’s younger twangy vocals from the early-mid 90s.
However by March of 2002, I would start hearing “I Breathe In, I Breathe Out” as more of a modern early 2000s song than a total mid 90s throwback. My dad and I saw the new remake of The Time Machine starring Guy Pearce in the theater when it came out that March. This was the second futuristic sci-fi movie we had seen that year so far, with the previous one being Impostor, starring Gary Sinise and Madeleine Stowe. Anyway, after we saw The Time Machine that Saturday night, the scenes where Pearce travelled forward into the future to the years 2030 and 2037 really stuck with me, in particular. I was really impressed with how the futuristic world looked during the 2030 part, and the 2037 part was quite scary with the moon falling apart and causing havoc on earth. Those scenes still stuck with me as I was laying in bed later that night before falling asleep, and it hit me that the futuristic world predicted in The Time Machine was already only less than 30 years away from where we were in real life, and it was kind of scary thinking that, knowing what happened to that world seven years later. Of course, I know now it’s just a movie, but that was my train of thought at the time, lol. Anyway, the whole time I was having these thoughts and thinking about the movie, Chris Cagle’s “I Breathe In, I Breathe Out” happened to be playing on my radio that night, as well, and instead of just hearing it as a mid 90s throwback song as I did previously, I suddenly heard it as a 2002 song, and even one that could possibly be heard in that futuristic 2030 world in The Time Machine, which didn’t seem so far away at the time. Particularly, I remember thinking the part in the second verse as Cagle sang “so until this woooorld stops turnin’ rouuund” sounded futuristic with the cool echo effect used on his vocal as he sang that line, which also made me think of the movie, since the world did nearly stop turning around when pieces of the moon were crashing into it. The sound of the electric guitar during parts of the bridge also now sounded futuristic to me, with examples of it at 2:45, 2:52, and 3:06. I just generally noticed for the first time that, while the song’s melody and fiddle playing reminded me of mid 90s country, much of the production itself was pretty current at the time and occasionally futuristic in spots, as I described above. To this day, Chris Lindsey’s production on this track very much reminds me of Mark Wright’s production style from the early 2000s. Now, I realize those “futuristic” sounding spots in “I Breathe In, I Breathe Out” may have just been all in my head, but that’s personally how I still hear it today, especially whenever I hear Cagle sing “so until this wooooorld stops turnin’ rooound,” which still reminds me of early 2002 after seeing The Time Machine today.
Lyrically, “I Breathe In, I Breathe Out” does well enough for me as a post break up/ “dealing with losing a special someone in your life” kind of song. Yes, it’s been done better, but it somehow still works for me. And as Bobby said, there’s a certain likeable, regular guy charm to Cagle’s performance. I especially always liked when things start to ramp up during the bridge and final chorus, where he puts even more emotion into his singing.
The music video for “I Breathe In, I Breathe Out,” was also one I always enjoyed seeing on GAC. I especially always liked the “baseball” parts closer to the end of the video, and the part where Cagle’s wife and son fade into the cornfield would always make me sad, since it symbolized him no longer having the loving family life he once had. When Dennis Quaid came out with a baseball movie, The Rookie, later in 2002, it actually made me think of the baseball scenes in this video.
Another one of my favorite CD’s I enjoyed listening to in the Summer of 2002 was David Kersh’s 1998 sophomore album, If I Never Stop Loving You, and after I picked up the album, that’s when I found out that Kersh was the first one to record “I Breathe In, I Breathe Out.” The thing was, Kersh’s version of that song was actually one of my least favorite cuts on that album, and I much preferred Cagle’s more popular version, since I thought he put more emotion into it, and perhaps I was just more used to it, as well.
As for other Chris Cagle songs I enjoy, his debut single “My Love Goes On And On” is still a bit of a guilty pleasure for me today, and it takes me back to 2000 when I was hearing it countless times on 102.9 WKIK out in Southern Maryland. While our two main stations in Northern Virginia weren’t playing it yet, WKIK was never afraid of playing brand new singles from brand new artists right off the bat, and my dad and I would hear it quite regularly in his car on that station long before the other two stations finally started playing it, as well. I also remember hearing that Cagle was a new artist on Virgin Records, which was also home to Jerry Kilgore, whose Love Trip album I was enjoying during 2000. I also enjoy Cagle’s second single release, the southern rockin’ “Laredo,” which was all over the radio in the Summer of 2001, and seemed to stay on the charts forever. I agree with MarkMinnesota on it being one of his best songs. It’s still a pretty fun listen for me today.
The one other Chris Cagle song I really enjoy besides “…Breathe out” and “Laredo” is 2003’s “What A Beautiful Day.” It seems like it was one of the last of the early 2000s feel good pop country tunes, and I like the concept of him literally counting all the days he has with his romantic partner. I’ve always liked the arrangement as well, which kind of reminds me of “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton, especially with the opening piano and beat.
It’s just ok. I would give it a “C+”. The exaggerated southern accent gets on my nerves a bit.
…i like this tune quite a bit but after all these years i still can’t get that picture/story out of my head of drunk chris cagle and his (also tipsy?) girlfriend hitting each other reportedly with an umbrella (she) and with her purse (he) over their heads in public. pure slapstick, despite all pain involved.