I love Gordo's music, but Easier is the song I keep coming back to. I had been thinking about it again after reading W.T. Moore's We Can't Protect the Past by Restricting the Future, an essay about Noel Gallagher and how the music we love can change without betraying what came before. Gordo made his own change when he left behind the Carnage name and pursued a different kind of house music. On DIAMANTE, among an extraordinary collection of collaborators, Easier feels especially personal. What I hear most clearly is Gordo's judgment about how all these sounds should live together.
I love those echoey background vocals. They drift in and out as though they're coming from another room, sometimes almost more like another layer of music than a human voice. Underneath them there's a melancholy bass drone that gives the track its emotional weight. It isn't showing off, and it doesn't need to. The bass just hangs there while other sounds move around it. That combination makes the song feel a little sad, but it's a sadness I actually enjoy sitting with. By the time the rhythm draws you in, it feels as though the song has been holding that feeling for a while.
In a song full of electronic production, I also love that the autotune sounds intentional. I can hear what it's doing, and I like it. Instead of calling attention to a production trick, it gives the voice a slightly distant texture that belongs with those lingering background vocals. Nothing sounds as though it's competing to be the most impressive idea.
The lyrics are simple, too. They have something to do, and they do it without demanding to be the most important thing in the room. That's something I recognize in Noel Gallagher's music. A lyric doesn't always need to tell you an elaborate story or survive being pulled away from the melody and examined on its own. Sometimes a few uncomplicated words are exactly enough, because the music around them is doing just as much of the talking.
I keep coming back to the three H's when I try to put my finger on it. They're hypnotic beats, heartbreaking melodies and a haunting presence. The first two are easy enough to hear. The third is harder to isolate because it doesn't belong to one instrument or effect. It's what all those sounds create together. What I find so satisfying about Easier is that nothing dominates. Not the vocals, not the bass, not the effects, not even the beat. It's the blend of musical ideas that makes the song what it is. Turn up one of those ingredients too much and you might make it easier to notice, but you could lose whatever is happening between them. That restraint is a much harder thing to achieve than it sounds. I hear real confidence in it.
That's what makes the title mean something different to me. Easier isn't easy because the sadness has gone away. The melancholy bass is still there, and those echoing vocals don't suddenly become cheerful. What feels easier is the way the music lets different moods occupy the same space without one needing to drown out the others. Nothing has to win. There's a kind of relief in that, and Gordo achieves it through arrangement rather than asking the lyrics to explain it. It's such a simple idea, but I don't think it's a simple thing to make.
It's also a track with no featured artist named alongside Gordo, which is unusual on an album shared with Drake, T-Pain, Leon Bridges and many others. That doesn't mean he made Easier on his own. The published recording credits identify Nathan Nicholson as a vocalist, composer and producer. Gregor Sütterlin, Anders Grahn, Metin Kumru and Luke Hincapié are credited as composers alongside Gordo, whose legal name is Diamante Anthony Blackmon. The recording was released through Ultra Records. It's easy to forget how many people might be involved when an artist's name is the only one on the front.
It made me curious about licensing. A song can sound like one continuous thought while its legal rights sit in different hands. The underlying composition, including original melody and lyrics, is one protected work. The particular recorded performance, often called the master, is separately protected. A licence is permission to do something with those rights, perhaps reproduce or distribute a recording, stream it, play it publicly or put it in a film. Permission to synchronize the composition with a video doesn't automatically grant the right to use the original master, and merely buying or streaming a copy gives the listener no general authority to exploit the music commercially. Neither a mood nor a genre is owned just because an artist made something memorable in it.
Canada and the United States share that basic separation of composition and recording. Both have systems for identifying rightsholders and paying royalties, and both distinguish copyright ownership from contractual arrangements among writers, performers, publishers and labels. In Canada, SOCAN handles public-performance licensing for musical works, CMRRA manages certain reproduction or mechanical rights, and Re:Sound handles qualifying remuneration for performances of sound recordings. The Canadian Copyright Act also recognizes moral rights in musical works, and certain performers' moral rights, that can be waived but not assigned. A transfer of economic copyright alone doesn't eliminate those distinct interests.
The U.S. system is different in some details that matter to musicians. Its federal moral-rights protections are far narrower for music, and the public-performance right in sound recordings is generally directed at digital audio transmissions. Conventional over-the-air radio therefore occupies a different position from Canada, where qualifying public performance or communication of published recordings can trigger remuneration for performers and makers. In the United States, SoundExchange handles certain noninteractive digital performance royalties, while the Mechanical Licensing Collective administers the blanket mechanical licence for eligible interactive streaming uses of musical compositions. Private licences and negotiations remain important on both sides of the border.
These rules protect different people and different activities. A songwriter may have rights in the composition even if another person sings it. Performers and recording owners may hold separate rights connected to a particular performance or master. A broadcaster, nightclub, streaming service or film producer needs rights suited to what it actually proposes to do. In particular, sampling an existing recording, making a remix or licensing music for a commercial can raise questions that ordinary home listening never does. The names appearing on a track listing alone don't tell us who owns which rights, or whether any person agreed to a particular royalty split. I wouldn't pretend to know those arrangements for Easier.
There's a documented publishing connection in Gordo's career. In December 2020, Kobalt announced a worldwide publishing deal with him under his former Carnage name, covering administration, creative services and synchronization opportunities for his catalogue and future work. It doesn't establish which agreements govern Easier or how its contributors divide any royalties. I'd be interested to know what the paperwork behind this particular recording looks like, especially with so many composers attached to a track whose artist credit is only one name.