Easy Livin'

"Easy Livin" has long been a fun-time party song, a go-to for small-town cover bands on Saturday nights, sure to win over the crowds. It makes sense, as the lyrics seem to about living a comfortable, stress-free life. Like Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good" and Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing," however, the song is actually meant to be ironic. Uriah Heep member Ken Hensley, who wrote this and most of the band's biggest songs, talked to Songfacts about the inspiration for this one. "After a few long days in the studio, some of us were sharing a taxi home, and the conversation drifted to the fact that most people see our lives as easy. That we just show up at a venue, play, collect a million dollars and go home!" The words "life" and "easy" stuck in Hensley's mind, and that night when he got back to his flat, he wrote "Easy Livin" in "about 15 minutes."

Hensley had no idea that "Easy Livin" would be such a hit. He told Songfacts, "I knew we had a great song for the band and it translated into a great live song but, since I never wrote (nor write) with a particular 'destination' in mind, I hardly ever considered that a song may succeed to any extent at all."

This was the only Uriah Heep song to crack the Top 40 in the United States. It was an even bigger hit in the Netherlands and Finland, two countries that proved to be longtime bastions of Heep fandom.