Songfacts®:

• Thanks to songs like her breakthrough "The Way I Am," which featured in an Old Navy commercial, Ingrid Michaelson's voice was already familiar to TV viewers by the time her vulnerable ballad "Keep Breathing" memorably closed out season 3 of Grey's Anatomy. In the 2007 episode, titled "Didn't We Almost Have It All," it soundtracks a heartbreaking moment in the aftermath of a character being left at the altar. Michaelson's lyrics impart words of wisdom in how to deal with circumstances that are out of our control:
  
  All that I know is I'm breathing
  All I can do is keep breathing
  All we can do is keep breathing
• Michaelson had already landed a few cuts on Grey's, so she was aiming for another placement when she wrote the song, which wasn't typical of her songwriting process at the time. While she proved to be adept at writing music that paired well with TV scenes, it wasn't intentional.
  
  "I had no sync realizations - I didn't know what sync was when I was writing the records," she told Songfacts in a 2024 interview. "It was all this pure writing that seemed to resonate with music supervisors. I feel like I had a sound that went well with TV. Sometimes I'm like, 'Is it good that my songs are on in the background?' But most of the time you hear the lyrics and they use them in a way that furthers the plot and emotional pull of the scene."
• Michaelson says the key to writing music for sync placements is simplicity, which comes naturally to her. "I write very simply. I don't adorn things - I tell it like it is in a way that maybe you've never thought of before," she explained. "It's the simplicity, but it's not easy to do simple, well. I kind of cut to the heart and the chase. That simple lyricism works well when you need something to cut through and leave its mark in the middle of some intense scene. You can't have too many metaphors and too much flowery language. You kind of need to get to the meat and potatoes of the sentiment of the song and of the moment. It's not that I try to do that, it's always what I've done."
• A cover version by Congratulationz showed up on Grey's Anatomy for its 300th episode, "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story" (2017) during a surgery sequence.
• "Keep Breathing" was used in these movies:
  Moms' Night Out (2014)
  Detention Of The Dead (2012)
  
  And these TV shows:
  Cracked ("The Light In Black" - 2013)
  The Big C ("Summer Time" - 2010)