That’s the chorus in a song from the first Amy Winehouse album, “Frank,” released in 2003. She is singing to a man (or drug?) that “is too hard to ignore.” Her backup singers chant her name three times to a swaying, vaguely Middle Eastern beat, as if summoning her back from a lover’s trance. And Amy asks a strange musical question:
“So where’s my moral parallel?”
What did she mean? What was she thinking? WHAT WAS SHE THINKING? That’s all that her fans can wonder in the wake of her utterly predictable yet still shocking death on Saturday at age 27.
The song “Amy, Amy, Amy” engages in a bit of unintentional ironic foreshadowing. “Creative energy abused,” she sings. “All my lyrics go unused.”
It is hard to remember that the five-time Grammy winner and troubled soul had a life before the beehive and the booze and the drugs, before the fame, before the disastrous comeback concerts in which she could barely walk straight and could not remember the lyrics that she wrote: “They tried to make me go to rehab, I said, ‘No, no, no.’ ”
Advertisement
I met a British writer a while ago whose kid was in kindergarten with Amy Winehouse. They called her “that crazy Amy Winehouse” even back then. So perhaps she was always a little off. Yet there was a time when she seemed very serious about turning her expressive, brassy voice, shaped by the jazz records of her parents and paternal grandmother, into the voice of a star.
Share this articleShareLook at a YouTube video of a pre-beehive Amy singing on a British TV special from New Year’s Eve 2004, hosted by band leader and pianist Jools Holland.
Winehouse’s face is framed by long, straight black hair. She wears a blousy white top with a red geometric design, a short (but not too short) black skirt. She seems nervous in the seconds before she begins to sing the Dinah Washington hit “Teach Me Tonight.” But the warmhearted horns of Holland’s band calm her down and rev her up. Her tart tone is clearly influenced by Washington, but the Winehouse style emerges as she bends notes in unexpected ways, plays with rhythm but never loses the beat, and captures the essence of a young girl yearning for love.
“Did you say I had a lot to learn?” she asks in a voice full of tenderness and sass and creative energy.
All her many fans can do is shake our heads and sigh, “Amy, Amy, Amy.”
Written by Express contributor Marc Silver
Photo courtesy of Sean Gallup/Getty Images
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLK5vNGeqqxnp6V8c3yQamZpb19ngnCywJ2cZqyfYq%2BtrcKkZKudnZq6o7HRoqWgZZGixm7DyKecoaelqLJw