As always, I’m the last to figure it out. I don’t listen to the radio, and I have to admit: I am not up on the “latest” thing, and usually it comes to me by accident: I’ll hear a song playing in a store and be compelled to run out and buy the whole thing. So all I know about Amy Winehouse is what the tabloids tell me. She seems to enjoy strolling around the streets of London at 3 a.m. in her underwear. She also enjoys buying junk food. She prefers filthy ballet flats and appears to have lost 5 teeth in a 3 month period. She is a trainwreck. I’ve seen the pictures. But never heard her album. Siobhan loved it – hell, everybody loves it – but I had no idea. I didn’t even know what KIND of music it was. So last weekend, we all were hanging out in the tattoo parlor, with Beans, et al … and a song came on, and it pierced right through me. I wondered who it was. It sounded vaguely like Billie Holliday. With maybe some Dinah Washington thrown in. Could it be Eartha Kitt, whom I love? WHO THE HELL IS THAT SINGING BECAUSE SHE IS AWESOME? I asked Beans, and he said, “Amy Winehouse.” So, okay. Yeah. I’m the dummie. I went out and bought her album, and since then – it has been on eternal repeat. This chick is unbelievable. The voice, the sound – it’s almost like a Dirty Dancing sound – that type of girl-rock in the 1960s, but more guttural, more grounded. Damn, it’s some good stuff. I can’t stop listening to it.
Again, I realize I’m the last to figure it out.
Better late than never.
Hey! Welcome to the Winehouse train!! (from the next-to-last to figure these things out) :)
I also heard (or read) a ton of gossip about her before I had ever listened to one of her songs, and since I don’t listen to music on the radio either, I didn’t know what kind of music she sang – I hardly knew she was a singer, for Heaven’s sake! And after reading so much about what a pity it is that she seems to be a wreck most of the time, with her “amazing voice” and “fantastic talent” and all the superlatives like that, I got curious and decided to listen to some of her music.
She blew my brains out!
I spent two months straight last year listening to her two albums over, and over, and over again, her songs did NOT leave my head. Those two albums are gems, she’s indeed amazing.
I realize I “discovered” her in one of the most negative ways ever (her endless string of appearances in tabloids, her drug problems, her “bad news” in general), but I sincerely hope she can get it together and be well. She has serious talent.
I still can’t connect her voice to her face. When I watch her sing it seems like the voice should sound different for her face, or her face should look different for that voice. It sounds like the voice of a fifty year old blues/jazz singer, not a 24 year-old anybody. Sometimes I think, “She’s gotta be lip-synching to Alberta Hunter.” She’s amazing.
p.s. – I was hugely late on this discovery as well.
The thing I love about Winehouse is that all her songs have this sultry, nostalgic sound of music you might have listened to in a smokey club in the 40s or something. Except the chorus will have a lyric like “What kind of fuckery is this?”
Emily – hahaha, yeah really – and isn’t there some line about “keeping your dick wet”?
I feel like Eartha Kitt WOULD have sung such dirty lines if she had been ALLOWED. haha I love her.
But damn – Winehouse’s voice (and the feel of the music: the girl-group backup singers, the trumpets, the grinding sound to it) – it’s just awesome!!
Welcome to the World Baby Sheila! I’ve loved her since the album came out but she’s a freakin train wreck!
I’m hoping she doesn’t die…I’d love to hear another album or two!
De – I know! I’d love it if she could keep going, but the fact that the first song on the album begins with the lyrics: “They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said No No No …” does not bode well! Ha! But damn – she’s so great!!
if you can make a jazz standard out of telling your friend that her boyfriend needs to stop smoking all of your weed, you’re worthy of being put on “eternal repeat”!
there’s a very disturbing YouTube video of her performing on stage and taking a bump of coke out of her gnarled beehive, doing the bump (as if 2,000 people are not watching her) and then tucking it back into the safety of her tresses. fucked up, but brilliant at the same time!
oh, and any other YouTube clip of her performing under the influence, stumbling through her own songs, rivals most britney antics!
Jonathan is so right. The voice, the face; you’re like, “whaaa???” Love her. Would she be as amazing if she weren’t a total trainwreck, I wonder.
Another Amy Winehouse fan here. Omg, that voice. It sounds like it just knows so much.
She is (for better AND worse) the 21st century equivalent of Janis Joplin. I hope she doesn’t destroy herself.
PS – you just reminded me to post tonight about my own musical discovery. Thanks!
Sheila- the same thing happened to me! I think I was getting the tattoo at the time her song came on and I was thinking- who is this? why don’t I know who this is already?? I need to have her music! I didn’t realize that it was you who asked him who it was. so funny!
Mere – yeah – I totally expected him to say it was, like, Eartha Kitt or something – so I immediately went out and bought the thing. It’s so good!
And yes, you were under the knife at that moment, you warrior!!
I can’t verify this and don’t feel like visiting Googlerama right now, but Amy reportedly told an interviewer who asked her how her troubled, personal lifestyle could impact younger fans, “Iâm not in this to be a fucking role model.”
If you like her sound, imagine transplanting her to Australia, cleaning her up, and you’ve got Sia Furler (who’s done some work with Zero 7). For a taste, go to YouTube and check her “Day Too Soon” video done at KCRW in 2007. Her pure happiness at the end of the song stands in very stark contrast to what poor Amy must be going through now. Come back, Amy!
sheil..i love ur eartha kitt analogy..she’s weird and ethnically untraceable like eartha..and the music sounds like vintage Burt Bachrach soulful pop..she is fascniating…is she really a crackhead..is it media exageration?? tsk, tsk..she’s talented
I’ve been listening to her since her FIRST album came out – she’s great. But scary. And dear God, she must have been about 12 then!
Hey me too… I think it’s interesting that I knew all about her personal life, her problems, her marriage, etc etc etc., long before I ever heard her music. The media is weird like that.
I love her song Rehab and her cover of Valerie just to bits – but I think a lot of that startling sound is her producer, actually; and before she created her image, the tats and hair etc., she was really overlooked, you know? That whole myth of the tortured female singer: Billie and Edith and Janis, like you can’t be taken seriously unless you have DEMONS, which you exhibit as publically as possible. She has benefited from that trope, but it seems to be doing her in.
And she’s not ethnically obscure! she’s a Jewish girl from north London, yeah