“No Easy Way Down” (Dusty Springfield)

We’re still working through the tracks on Dusty Springfield’s legendary Dusty in Memphis album and now we’re on side two, near the end. The song is “No Easy Way Down,” written by the equally legendary team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King. This is track 10, the next-to-last track on side two.

Like many of the songs on this album, Dusty wasn’t the first to record “No Easy Way Down.” It was originally recorded by a band called the Germz in 1967, then by Jackie DeShannon, then by the Hour Glass, then, in 1969, by Dusty. Carole King included a version of this song on her Writer album in 1970; that’s the album that immediately preceded her groundbreaking 1971 album, Tapestry. The song has since been covered by the likes of Barbra Streisand, on her Stoney End album, and, more recently by Norah Jones.

“No Easy Way Down” is, in a roundabout away, about the ending of a relationship and the fact that “there is no easy way down” from the “heights of love.” Gerry’s lyrics are atypically flowery and enigmatic, but you get the point. Dusty, as usual, sells the heck out of it. It’s the perfect wind down, leading into the album’s concluding track, which we’ll cover tomorrow.

As to the music, this is pure Carole King, showing a smooth migration from her earlier Brill Building style into her later singer/songwriter approach. It’s in the key of G and uses a lot of extended chords and altered bass chords. Of particular note is what I call the “Carole King Chord,” a iim7 with the fifth in the bass—in this instance, an Am7/D, which leads back to the root of G. This approach is a bit more elegant than the typical V or V7 but plays the same dominant-to-tonic role,

This track also includes a neat little progression at the end of each verse. In the “there is no easy way down” part, the chords track downwards with the lyrics, going CMaj7 – Bm7 – Am7 – Am7/D – D7 (except when it ends on an E7, leading to a key change to A in the outro). Cool stuff.

We’ll wrap up Dusty in Memphis tomorrow. I hope this is inspiring some of you to give the album and its noteworthy songs another listen. It’s really the best of late-60s songwriting combined with Dusty’s more mature, more soulful vocals and the swampy backing of the Memphis Boys. There’s a reason it’s a classic.