Amy winehouse songs back to black

100 Best Albums Producer Mark Ronson remembers when Amy Winehouse came in with the lyrics for “Back to Black.” They were at a studio in New York in early 2006, their first day working together.

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Ronson had given her a portable CD player with the song’s piano track, and Winehouse disappeared into the back for about an hour to write. It came about in March 2006 when she was persuaded to meet Mark Ronson in the producer’s Greenwich Village recording studio. On her arrival there, she mistook Ronson for a recording engineer and, according to her father Mitch in his 2012 book, Amy, My Daughter, thought the producer would be “an older Jewish guy with a big beard.” Nevertheless, the two talked, bonded through their love of music, and the next day, Ronson had written the beginning of a song for her, as he recalled to MOJO in 2010: “I came up with this little piano riff, which became the verse chords to ‘Back To Black.’ Behind it, I just put a kick drum and a tambourine and tons of reverb.”

Winehouse was thrilled with Ronson’s idea; she quickly wrote some lyrics based on what she was going through at the time and then they recorded a demo of the song.

Not only did I play some phenomenal new releases, but I also caught up on some old classics too. For all her brashness, what makes Back to Black so moving is the sense that Winehouse is constantly trying to punch through her pain—not to suppress it exactly, but to wrap it in enough barbed wire that nobody could quite reach its core. The chorus, though, kept tripping him up because it didn’t rhyme: “We only said goodbye with words, I died a hundred times.” He asked her to change it, but she just gave him a blank look: That’s just how it came out, she didn’t know how to change it.

Fantastic album.

“He Can Only Hold Her” has been marred a little by its hook being used in adverts, but the song itself is still a bop.

5 – Tears Dry On Their Own

One of the most positive, uplifting songs on the album (even though the lyrics are still quite downbeat).

4 – You Know I’m No Good

I almost put “You Know I’m No Good” in the “Amazing” tier – it’s another Winehouse classic.

It’s slick and the woodwind section are very tight.

Mournful strings and an ominous tolling bell create a funereal atmosphere, which is dramatically juxtaposed with a danceable, retro-slanted musical backdrop inspired by 60s girl-group pop and Phil Spector’s wall of sound production values.

The recording

“Back To Black” was the first song Winehouse wrote and recorded for her second album.

The appeal to soul music is obvious: the Motown horns (“Rehab,” “Tears Dry on Their Own”), the girl-group romance (“Back to Black”), the organic quality of the arrangements (“You Know I’m No Good”)—much of it courtesy of Brooklyn outfit The Dap-Kings. What she reemerged with was masterful: bleak, funny, tough, hopelessly romantic. “Wake Up Alone” is one of many vulnerable moments on the album – which is what made Winehouse such a great artist.

7 – Love Is A Losing Game

A classy ballad.

Winehouse’s rise had begun just three years earlier in 2003, when the singer/songwriter – a magnetic artist from London’s Camden Town district – released Frank, a debut album whose stylish amalgam of jazz, soul, and funk flavors wowed the critics. The happy-go-lucky vibe of her debut was replaced by a much darker autobiographical hue on Back To Black, which explored the emotional turmoil the singer felt after splitting up with her boyfriend, Blake Fielder-Civil.

Buy Amy Winehouse’s iconic song “Back to Black” on limited edition picture disc here.

Although the album’s biggest hit was the infectious “Rehab,” about Winehouse’s real-life battle with addiction, arguably its cornerstone was its title song, a cathartic symphony of sadness written by the singer together with Mark Ronson, the London-born US producer who helmed six of Back To Black‘s eleven songs.

Using the word “black” as a metaphor for the abyss of depression, “Back To Black” is a bleak, grief-stricken portrait of heartbreak purportedly inspired by Winehouse’s ex-boyfriend’s infidelity.

It has hints of the Golden Age of music, as if Nancy Sinatra is pouring her heart out.

Great

6 – He Can Only Hold Her

Over half the songs on “Back To Black” are “Great” or higher.