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Amy Winehouse's emotional hit

This is a song that I do every once and a while at karaoke. It has such emotive depth, which plays to my strengths as a singer and while it’s very dark, it’s fun to go to that place with my voice. She wrote it when her future husband had left her to go back to her old girlfriend and you can feel the pain in every word.

This is the title track of Amy Winehouse’s big breakout album released in 2006. It was the third single off the album and did well, although it only hit #1 in Greece. The song was written the night she met producer Mark Ronson. She talked about her love of 60s girl groups, especially the Shangri-Las. After she left Ronson’s studio, he came up with the distinctive piano/drum combo that drives the song overnight. The next morning, she came back to the studio, loved the sound and said she wanted the whole album to sound like that. She then wrote the lyrics in an hour while listening to the loop.

The black and white video directed by video director/photographer and personal friend Phil Griffin shows Winehouse dressed in black in her room while flashing to black cars and a group of men outside. We track her coming downstairs to join them and discover it’s a funeral. Instead of a casket, it’s a box. Originally it contained a shot of the headstone that read R.I.P. the Heart of Amy Winehouse but was edited out after her death. It’s taking the lyrics I died a hundred times to a new level.

The video was primarily shot nearby Gibson Gardens and Chesholm Road in Stoke Newington, London. The graveyard scenes were filmed at Abney Park Cemetery in north-east London. I’m pretty sure the men with instruments are from her touring band but I can’t find confirmation on this.

Ronson talks about the creation of the song and plays sections of the original demo in this video. You really get a sense of how Winehouse created and how its 60s throwback sound came about.

Enjoy your song of the day!