Songfacts®:

• In this 10-minute album closer, Callahan sings, "It's time to put God away." Callahan explained to Mojo magazine April 2009: "I've been reading a lot of atheist writers: Mark Twain, Richard Dawkins, Robert Ingersoll, Ian McEwan, Mencken, Lovecraft. Obama mentioned 'non-believers,' in his inauguration speech. I wanted to write a song that backed all this up."
• Bill Callahan ends the song and the album with the lyric "It's time to put God away."
  
  "It's a culmination song," he told Uncut magazine. "It's a time-suspending song. You have to put it at the end."
  
  The atheistic lyric can be traced back to the Bible. (1 Corinthians 13:11)
  
  When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things
• Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle marked Bill Callahan's first collaboration with arranger Brian Beattie, entrusting him with the album's string and horn arrangements. "Just the formality of that was something big, a new approach," he told Mojo magazine in 2023.
  
  "I think a lot of the record is about something dying, and the idea of yourself dying or a vision of the future dying, in a bad and good way," Callahan added. "All those painful false things that need to dive as huge as the last song Faith Void is, there's the first blooms of spring there underneath the death of winter."
• Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle soared with critics, garnering widespread praise. It landed on numerous Best Of lists at the year's end, with a particularly impressive showing as Mojo magazine's second favorite album of 2009.
  
  The acclaim continued years later. In 2013, NME magazine cemented the album's legacy by including it at #443 on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.