The Old Guitar and “Easy From Now On”
by Kroes den Bock
Let me tell you a thing about a song—a rare, true country song—that’s both a salve and a scar, and about the night it first carved its mark on my heart. It was the spring of 1978, Helmond was shaking off the last of its winter frost, and underneath our low Dutch clouds, I pressed play on a cassette that a dear, wandering friend had mailed to me all the way from Oklahoma. That song was “Easy From Now On,” written by Susanna Clark and Carlene Carter, and immortally sung by Emmylou Harris, but for reasons I’ll explain, its echoes have woven themselves deeper into me than many a hit ever could.
Back then, there wasn’t much country radio in the Netherlands, but I haunted the second-hand record stalls at Marktplein with the fever of a treasure hunter. On the cover of “Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town,” Emmylou stood pale and distant, the gatefold sleeve barely holding its moody, honeyed promise. The cassette was already spooled halfway to the B-side, but I rewound, knowing my friend’s taste for the out-of-the-way. The tape hissed, then those first notes unfurled: sweet, steady, like the memory of soft rain in spring fields.
You should know, “Easy From Now On” was never the song everyone whistled on the street. Unlike “Pancho and Lefty” or “The Gambler,” it didn’t break charts or get stuck in the world’s jukebox. Maybe precisely because of that, its wild, defiant resignation felt more authentic. “Easy From Now On” became—at least for a brief spell in the late ‘70s—a secret handshake among the wayward and the wounded, those of us yearning for escape, or forgiveness, or both.
The lyrics, if you never heard them, go like this:
*There he goes gone again
Same old story’s got to come to an end
Lovin’ him was a one-way street
But I’m gettin’ off where the crossroads meet
It’s a quarter moon in a ten cent town
Time for me to lay my heartaches down
Saturday night, I’m goin’ to town
‘Cause it will be easy from now on…*
It’s those lines, “a quarter moon in a ten cent town,” that grabbed me by the throat. Helmond in those days wasn’t Nashville or Amarillo, but lord, we had our own ten cent towns and too many quarter moons above us, pale and watching over cheap laundromats and smokey bars. Listening to Emmylou’s voice, high and tremulous as a willow, I understood something else—the country song doesn’t just come from the South, or the prairies of Texas. It comes from anywhere you ever loved and lost, or lost yourself.
The night I first heard “Easy From Now On,” I was twenty-nine years old, sunburned from a day laying bricks along the Zuid-Willemsvaart, and sore in a way that wasn’t just muscles. I’d just written a letter to a girl in Limburg—one of those confessions you sketch in chicken-scratch, raw honesty on cheap blue airmail paper. I didn’t expect an answer. All I had was my father’s beat-up guitar and the static of the world outside my attic window.
And then that song came to me, sure as fate. With each chorus Emmylou sang, it felt like she was reading from the dirt-smudged diary of my soul.
*I’m goin’ to town / ‘Cause it will be easy from now on…*
Nobody in 1978 Helmond believed love could truly be “easy,” least of all me; maybe that’s why the words hit so deep. They’re a bluff—a necessary lie you tell yourself when you’re walking away from something, battered but not beaten. I sat on my attic bed and sang along, my voice a rough patchwork to Emmylou’s lilt. Outside, the city quieted, soothed by a cool wind. For the first time, I believed I’d make it through another night.
“Easy From Now On” is a survivor’s anthem dressed in small town melancholy. It isn’t jubilant or angry or broken; it’s dignified, real, and stubborn. “There he goes, gone again, same old story’s got to come to an end.” How many times I returned to those words, in the years to come? You don’t grow old without needing them—whether you’re let go from a job, left by a lover, or just watching history’s storms roll over Brabant.
In the grim years that followed—factory closures, friends packing off to greener pastures—my guitar and this song kept me company. When the world wanted Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, I gave them this half-forgotten hymn. “It will be easy from now on”—I’d croon in smoky bars, to a handful of drunks or, sometimes, just the barmaid. If you played it enough, the words became a prophecy, not just a memory.
It isn’t the biggest talent who sings the truest, you know. That’s why “Easy From Now On” lives in the small hours, the half-lit kitchens where you pour another jenever and hope for dawn. It’s a song for crossing old bridges and burning a few on the way. The beauty is in the restraint: just a heart, raw and stubborn, ready to try again.
I’m older now, the world’s a touch faster, and the cassettes are mostly packed away, but every so often, usually on spring nights, I pick up the old guitar, press “play” in my head, and let those lines ride the wind above Helmond.
*a quarter moon in a ten cent town
time for me to lay my heartaches down…*
For those out there who’ve never heard “Easy From Now On,” I beg you: find it, listen with your eyes closed. Feel what it’s like to put your sorrow down for an evening, even if it’s never truly easy. Maybe that’s the secret of the song. For just under three minutes, it lets you believe. And some nights, that’s enough.
Keep singing,
Kroes den Bock