Fifty years ago tonight, on October 29, 1976, a recording truck pulled up to Graceland. Elvis didn’t feel like driving out to a studio, so the studio came to him. RCA hauled their gear right into the den, the wood-paneled room with the tiki carvings and the green shag carpet that fans now call the Jungle Room.
He worked through the night. The session ran from around 9 in the evening until 8 the next morning, with his longtime producer Felton Jarvis running the tape. Jarvis had been at Elvis’s side for years and knew how to sit back and let him take his time.
The very first song Elvis sang that night was a soft, aching ballad called “It’s Easy for You.”
That quiet little song didn’t come from a Nashville regular or one of the Memphis writers Elvis usually leaned on. It came from two young Englishmen.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
If the names don’t land right away, their work will. By 1976 the pair had already written “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita.” Lloyd Webber went on to write “Cats” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” two of the biggest shows Broadway has ever put on. Rice later wrote the words to the songs in “The Lion King.” And somehow one of their tunes ended up on a music stand in Elvis Presley’s living room.
Give it a listen below and hear how settled and sure he sounds, singing it soft and close.
Elvis singing “It’s Easy for You” at Graceland that night
One reviewer who studied the session tapes says Elvis “finds the melody right on first take,” which is no small thing even for him. The version you hear on the record is actually take 2, but by all accounts he had the song almost from the moment he opened his mouth. That same reviewer figures it was “Written by Lloyd Webber and Rice with Elvis in their mind.” That’s one man’s read though, not anything the writers ever said out loud.
Lloyd Webber clearly never forgot it. In 2018 he put together a big box set looking back over his whole career, and he found room on it for Elvis’s recording of “It’s Easy for You.” A song he’d dreamed up as a young man in England, sung back to him by the most famous voice on earth, taped in a den in Memphis.
The track came out the next summer as the last song on an album called “Moody Blue.” Most casual fans have never heard it. But for a tune tucked away at the end of a record, it ended up with quite a story sitting behind it.