“You weren’t getting ‘I’m heartbroken.’ You were getting ‘I’m going to take the piss out of you for thinking you’re going to do something to me.’” “That was her shifty comedic energy,” Remi tells Apple Music. Salaam Remi-who produced the half of the album that Ronson didn’t-says listening to her lyrics was like being with a kid who’s misbehaving: You want to laugh because it’s funny, but if you do, she’s just going to push it further. But the cartoon hearts: Those were her, too, no matter how hard she worked to keep them hidden. “He left no time to regret/Kept his dick wet with his same safe old bet”: That was her.

And drawn around the lyrics, little cartoon hearts, the kind you might see in a young girl’s diary.įor all her brashness, what makes Back to Black so moving is the sense that Winehouse is constantly trying to punch through her pain-not to suppress it, exactly, but to wrap it in enough barbed wire that nobody could quite reach its core. Magic,” which Winehouse covered on her first album, 2003’s Frank in another, the phone number of someone Ronson thinks Winehouse met at the club the night before. “Like, ‘What do you mean, change it? That’s how it came out-I don’t know how to change it.’” Ronson still has the page, actually: In one corner, the chords for the Grover Washington song “Mr. Like, doesn’t it have to rhyme?” He asked her to change it, but she just gave him a blank look. The chorus, though-it kept tripping him up: “We only said goodbye in words, I died a thousand times.” “This thing in my brain went off,” he tells Apple Music, “like Producer 101. What she reemerged with was great: bleak, but funny tough, but hopelessly romantic. Ronson had given her a portable CD player with the song’s piano track, and Winehouse disappeared into the back for about an hour to write.

The producer Mark Ronson remembers when Amy Winehouse came in with the lyrics for “Back to Black.” They were at a studio in New York in early 2006, their first day working together.

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