Louis Cardozo came home one day to his flat in Stokes Croft and found the fridge empty. Waiting for him were parking fines and a letter saying he hadn’t qualified for benefits, though he was chronically ill and unable to work. He went down to the corner shop, and his card was declined there. So he walked back home and began writing a song. That song became Easy Money, and it sits in the middle of his debut EP, Foreign Soul, which is out now.
I write a lot about what it costs to make music without a label or a safety net. Most of what reaches me comes as spreadsheets and grievances. This came as a sequence of small humiliations on a single afternoon, and I think that’s why it stays with me. None of it is dramatic on its own. A fine is a fine. A declined card at the till is the kind of thing most people have stood through at least once, face warm, pretending the machine is at fault. What makes his day hard to shake is the stacking: the state saying no and the bank saying no, within the same few hours, to someone who already couldn’t work.
Easy Money is about the thought that arrives on a day like that. As I hear it, the song is less angry than tempted. It’s about the desperation independent musicians feel when the money runs out, and the pull to sell out that comes with it. Perhaps that’s the braver subject. Owning up to how attractive the quick option looks when you can’t buy milk is hard, and Cardozo doesn’t pretend he’s above it. My reading is that the song keeps faith with the slower route anyway: a longer game where you hold on to what you set out to make, even while you can see exactly what you’d get by letting it go.
Easy Money draws on blues and soul, traditions with a long memory of people singing about being broke. It belongs in that line without sounding like an exercise in it. “I got holes in my pockets, I got holes in my jeans. Guess we’re shit out of luck and there’s nothing left to eat,” he half speaks in the first verse, his voice raspy and unhurried, and it reads as something written that same evening, by someone who needed to do something with the day other than sit in it.
There’s humour around the song too, and the video turns the whole thing into a motorbike bank heist, which feels like the right answer to that day. The song itself stays with the empty fridge. The first verse is where I’d ask you to start. If you’ve ever done the sums on whether to keep going, it will sound familiar.
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