Yester-day, I listened to an album of Roy Orbison songs titled The Essential Sun Years. One of these was stuck in my head last night, and I noticed something when I was playing it over in my head, but I wanted to verify it before I wrote a post about it.
But it does check out, and there's some really interesting duplicity going on in "Sweet and Easy to Love." If you pay attention to just the lead vocals, it seems like just a regular sort of 1950s love song. The first line is "Well, it's so sweet and easy to love you."
But if you pay attention to the backing vocals later in the song, you start to realize that the song has more depth than just those platitudes. After the guitar solo, the backing vocals change from just "ahs" to "sweeter than easy." "Sweeter than easy" implies that there is some difficulty in loving whoever's the subject of the song. Everything's not as picture-perfect as it seemed.
If you re-listen to the beginning with that "sweeter than easy" in mind, the lead vocals aren't quite as convincing. The first few lines are "Well, it's so sweet and easy to love you / Like I do / Yes it's true / I love you." To me, saying, "Yes it's true" indicates that the speaker/singer is trying a bit too hard to have this pristine loving relationship come across. And the backing vocals are what call this into question.
Of course, it could just be that "sweet and easy" was a syllable too short for the backing vocals so they added "-er" and substituted "than" for "and," but I think it's more interesting to look at it with the duplicity between the lead vocals and the backing vocals.
