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The second thing I noticed while listening to The Essential Alan Parsons Project this morning is in "La Sagrada Familia," originally from Gaudi. There are two recurring lines: "La Sagrada Familia for the lion and the lamb" and "La Sagrada Familia there's peace throughout the land." These two lines reminded me of two things: first, Elvis' "(There'll Be) Peace in the Valley (For Me)" and second, Isaiah 11:6-7:
The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
I wrote about "(There'll Be) Peace in the Valley (For Me)" earlier this year, specifically how that Isaiah text appears to be the source of one of the verses:
Well, the bear will be gentle, and wolves will be tame
And the lion shall lie down by the lamb, oh, yes
And the beast from the wild shall be led by a child
And I'll be changed, changed from this creature that I am, oh, yes
It seems that Eric Woolfson (the main writer for the Alan Parsons Project) took some inspiration from one or the other of these sources, but I'm not sure how familiar he was with either (if he was familiar with them at all).
There's a spoken part at the beginning of "La Sagrada Familia" that talks about a cathedral that Gaudà was building, so it would make sense to quote from the Bible when writing about a cathedral, yet while a lamb and a lion are both mentioned in the Isaiah text (along with peace, although not blatantly), they're not mentioned together like they are in the Elvis song. So while it seems that either (or both) of these could have inspired those lines in "La Sagrada Familia," I'm not sure if that's really the case.
