I'm from a different part of the country. The pack being swallowed in their coats doesn't sound bad or even odd to me, and fits better with "following" in the first sentence. But without a "thuh" instead of a long-e "the," I disturbingly keep hearing "I was following the eye..." It takes a slight break in the voice to say "thuh" before "I," which they probably didn't want. But saying it smoothly together with a long e makes me dislike the whole song.

Long e "the white" sounds off to me as well. But I grew up near, but not in the Ozarks, where "the" read aloud was almost always pronounced with a long e, and our teachers, often from the Ozarks, were careful not to correct either pronunciation of "the."