“Easy Now” by Eric Clapton

"Easy Now" is the quiet corner of Eric Clapton, his 1970 solo album for Polydor, and it's about as bare as a record gets: Clapton on a steel-string acoustic guitar, singing a love song he wrote himself, in F-sharp major if you care to play along. Delaney Bramlett produced and arranged it, Bill Halverson engineered and Tom Dowd mixed, and the smartest thing any of them did was stay out of its way.

It went out on the flip of "After Midnight" in 1970 and of "Let It Rain" in 1972, and turned up on Eric Clapton at His Best that same year. Critics have come round since: Marc Roberty called it underrated and more sincere than "Wonderful Tonight", and Guitar World's Damian Fanelli ranked it among the finest songs Clapton ever wrote, its bare arrangement keeping it from sounding dated.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.