Amy Winehouse Back To Black Album Download
Amy Winehouse on the first single and opening track from her second album Back to Black. It’s not your typical pop song, but Winehouse isn’t your typical pop singer. If she becomes as popular in the United States as she is in the United Kingdom, it will be despite her unwillingness to accept the monotonous realities of promotional mechanics. She’ll talk, but there’s no telling what she’ll say. (One of our favorites is her remark to Bono at last year’s Q Awards: “Shut up, I don’t give a fuck!”) She’ll be scheduled to perform, but no one knows what she’ll do or if she’ll even make it through the show. And she’ll sing about her problems, but she doesn’t care what you think of her.
If this makes Winehouse sound a little like Lily Allen, you’re not far off. Both are outsized singers who have found perfect vehicles for their outsized personalities. In Allen’s case, it’s a cigarette and a cocktail of pop, reggae, and hip-hop; in Winehouse’s case, it’s soul, jazz, and blues and a bottle of booze. Winehouse’s lyrics include references to Ray Charles, Donny Hathaway, and Slick Rick, and the two even share a producer: Mark Ronson, who has worked with everyone from Sean Paul and Macy Gray to Ghostface and Rhymefest.
But Winehouse is not a carbon copy of Lily Allen. After all, soul and jazz music are typically associated with adults, and while Winehouse could be accused of dressing up in these styles, she imbues her music with a surprisingly genuine soulfulness.
Fortunately, Winehouse has a brassy voice that can turn even the most mundane sentiments into powerful statements. She may be heartbroken, but she uses that pain to shape her songs, twisting the emotional scars to fit– and if she often appears to be the masochistic recipient of each knife twist, so be it. It isn’t until the album’s closing track, “He Can Only Hold Her,” that Winehouse finally shifts from first to third person, the “I”s and “me”s giving way to “he”s and “she”s, implying that she has finally become an objective observer, able to see her personal issues for what they are. “He tries to pacify her, ’cause what’s inside never dies,” she sings, and we can only assume that Winehouse has moved on from this new perspective.
Listen below.
