Easy

Lionel Richie wrote 'Easy' for Commodores' fifth studio album, released on Motown in 1977. The song is a slow ballad that expresses a man's feelings as a relationship ends, but rather than dwelling in despair, he frames his departure as liberation. The lyric 'I'm easy like Sunday morning' became the song's defining image, a phrase Richie had scribbled in his notebook during a period of professional pressure. The verses trace a familiar arc of exhaustion and compromise. Richie sings of begging, stealing, borrowing, of trying to meet expectations that leave him hollow. The bridge lifts the song's real subject into view: not heartbreak but autonomy, the desire to be free from constraint and to know that the things he does are right. The Sunday-morning simile carries the weight of that longing, a vision of ease that feels both domestic and unreachable. 'Easy' became another crossover hit for the group, following the success of an earlier single. Its appeal rests in the tension between the breakup premise and the calm resolve of Richie's delivery, a song that sounds like relief even as it describes the end of something.