Five Easy Pieces of four: The title of "Five Easy Pieces" refers not to the women its hero makes along the road, for there are only three, but to a book of piano exercises he owned as a child. The film, one of the best American films, is about the distance between that boy, practicing to become a concert pianist, and the need he feels 20 years later to disguise himself as an oil-field rigger. When we sense the boy, tormented and insecure, trapped inside the adult man, "Five Easy Pieces" becomes a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity... The movie is joyously alive to
Easy Pieces singing, and as a result he became self-conscious about his singing. Reflecting in 2004 on the process of recording "Easy Pieces", Cole felt that they had been pushed into making a second record too quickly: "We didn't give ourselves time to step back and think. The record company was telling us 'this is your moment and you must take it now' – which is crap. People would have waited for us. We were insecure so we made the record too soon and the record company fired Paul Hardiman." Unlike the widespread praise for "Rattlesnakes", the reception for "Easy Pieces" was