Johnny Payne seems to serve up a love song to laziness in his single “Calle Easy.” But don’t be fooled by its twinkling sheen and unbothered tone. Although the four minute track rivals even Jimmy Buffett in its cheerful soundscape, the lyrics allude to a loneliness that the speaker is desperate to escape–even while he lazes on the beach, parked out on “easy street.”
“Calle Easy” reveals a speaker who is lying to himself. Someone who has everything, yet still feels alone. He slips in and out of a persistent loneliness, half-asleep on the golden sand, “watching the pelicans drop and return from the sea.” Meanwhile, the instruments grin and flare with energy, creating a swaying effect that places the listener at the edge of the ocean. Payne’s rich vocals feign nonchalance, crooning and sighing along with the tropical descriptions. A distracted listener could easily slip into his sun-speckled world of delusion, into a place where everything looks and feels like a beach song. Yet the lyrics are dappled with unsettling details: the beach, for instance, is filled only with older people, with “skin like a shoe.” As the speaker observes the tourists, he wonders whether he is destined to turn into them. This existential anxiety soon refocuses back into loneliness as he looks around the beautiful coast and asks himself, “How can a person be here and still be blue?”
Johnny Payne’s “Calle Easy” is a clever, self-aware song that subverts its own genre to impressive effect.
