She made art about dealing with dark days about crying too hard and drinking too much. Her beehive might have been read as a caricature, but her substance was true. She was a storyteller, whose best work hit deep. Winehouse was not just a stadium-filling vocal, or a vessel for covers and standards. It’s that searing narrative voice that makes Back To Black unique, and that can’t be replicated in posthumous compilation releases like Lioness: Hidden Treasures or the Amy soundtrack. Winehouse, whose idols were Donny Hathaway and Billie Holliday, was a truly distinctive pop writer of her time. “They had a mutual respect for what was real,” he said. Winehouse’s longtime producer Salaam Remi told Billboard that this was part of her bond with the rapper Nas. In the footage unearthed for Amy, she spoke frankly about how music was her therapy for depression the subject material was genuine, and that honestly was palpable. These lyrics are worth noting, not to make a spectacle of Winehouse’s suffering, but to shine a light on her truly original songwriting. Discounting “Addicted,” a bonus track about annoying dudes who smoke all of your weed, Winehouse’s final words on the album are: He tries to pacify her, but what’s inside her never dies. There are moments of clarity, but no epiphany. ( She’s so vacant, her soul is taken,/ He thinks, what’s she running from?) Back To Black contains no true optimism or solution. ( Why do I stress the man/ When there’s so many bigger things at hand?) She leaves her body, and looks at herself with cool objectivity. ( He said, “I just think you’re depressed”/ This me, yeah baby, and the rest.) She speaks of truly disquieting feelings through songs you can turn up loud and belt out in your car like the realization that rejection is only one part of your problems. On Back To Black, her storytelling slices through the jangling ‘60s pop melodies with frank observations that feel bone-deep and real. When you write about stuff that’s so personal, you don’t have to dig that deep.” “I just wanted to write music that was emotional, and that people nnect with.” In other interviews, she insisted “I always write autobiographically” about “things that conflict me” she would disarmingly disclose that she was a “manic depressive.” In an interview with The FADER in 2008, she said, “I wrote songs about relationships that almost ended me. “A lot of the stuff that’s out, it’s not heartfelt,” she told an interviewer with shrugging candor while promoting her first LP in 2003. As a teenager I was drawn to its sticky-eyed sadness and macabre glamor as an adult, I keep returning to its emotional honesty. And, perhaps owing to the turbulence in her life at the time, it’s one of the truest, most devastating pop albums of the 21st century. In general, I’m conflicted about still loving Back To Black as much as I do, knowing that Winehouse’s ex-manager Nick Shymansky believes - as he stated in Asif Kapadia’s unflinching 2015 documentary, Amy - that if the singer had sought help to get sober instead of making the album that launched her to worldwide fame, she might be alive today.īut Winehouse did make the album. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel okay to sing along to her best-known song, “Rehab,” given the song documents a real-life, failed intervention. It doesn’t feel okay to refer to her with words like “messy” or “booze-swilling,” knowing these were the descriptors that tabloids used to tear her down when she was publicly battling addiction and other issues. I feel uncomfortable recalling my obsession with her larger-than-life persona. Ten years later, I’m now a little older than Winehouse was when she wrote Back To Black, a little younger than she was when she died in 2011 at the age of 27.