A quiet hymn of letting go, where love loosens its hold and a woman finds the strength to walk into her own light.
Easy From Now On arrived in 1978 as part of Emmylou Harris’s album Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, a record that blended country melancholy with a restless sense of reinvention. The song was released as a single that same year and made a strong showing on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, climbing to number 12. Written by Susanna Clarke and Carlene Carter, it stands among the most emotionally resonant pieces of Emmylou’s late-seventies era, a time when she was shaping the modern alt-country sound with both reverence and quiet rebellion.
What makes this song especially meaningful lies not only in its melody but in the real story woven behind it. Susanna Clark was more than just a songwriter in Emmylou’s orbit. She was a confidante, a painter, and part of a tightly knit creative circle that included her husband Guy Clark and their longtime friend Townes Van Zandt. She possessed an artist’s eye that saw truth in small details and an emotional courage that translated into hauntingly honest lyrics. It was Susanna who created the original painting that became the cover of Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, a piece that still resonates as one of the most quietly iconic covers of its era.
That painting, now held in the collection of Carlene Carter, is more than artwork. It is a window into the world these women inhabited in the late seventies, when songwriters gathered in living rooms, shared cigarettes and stories, and blurred the line between life and art. For Emmylou, recording Easy From Now On was not simply choosing a song. It was choosing a voice she trusted, a story she understood, and a woman whose sensitivity shaped the emotional landscape of Nashville songcraft.
The song itself carries a slow-burn resilience. It opens like a confession whispered into the dusk, but behind the vulnerability sits a quiet, steady strength. The narrator may be walking away from something painful, but she is walking with dignity. There is hurt, yes, but also clarity. The kind of clarity that only comes from surviving the long night of a love that no longer holds.
Listeners who were there when the song first played on the radio will remember the unmistakable gentleness in Emmylou’s phrasing. Her voice carries the ache without collapsing under it. She never rushes the words. Every line feels lived-in, softened by a memory but strengthened by experience. It is the sound of a woman who has learned that sorrow can be survived and that letting go is often the truest act of grace.
Over the years, Easy From Now On has become one of those songs people return to when they need reassurance that healing does not need fanfare. Its legacy endures not because it shouts its message, but because it understands the quiet places of the heart—the places where endings slowly turn into beginnings.
And perhaps that is why the song remains a favorite among those who have loved deeply, lost bravely, and learned, slowly but surely, to stand on their own two feet again.