Back to Black

Mark Ronson wrote the chord progression for "Back to Black" the night after he met Amy Winehouse. She had come to his studio on Mercer Street in Greenwich Village, played him records by the Shangri-Las and the Ronettes, and left. He sat at his piano and wrote what became the title track. The next day she came back, looked at what he had, and wrote all the lyrics in one sitting, scribbling them in the back of her notebook. The song was about Blake Fielder-Civil, who had left her for an ex-girlfriend. Winehouse used the word "black" as a metaphor for the total collapse she fell into when he left.

The production on the album is built entirely around sixties girl group records and Phil Spector's wall of sound, but the results never feel like pastiche because Winehouse herself was too real for imitation. Ronson produced six of the eleven tracks. Producer Salaam Remi handled the rest. "Rehab" itself came from a real moment: walking through New York with Ronson, Winehouse mentioned that her management had once tried to send her to treatment and her father had told them she was fine. Ronson stopped on the sidewalk and told her that was a song. Both producers used the house band from Daptone Records, a Brooklyn soul label that recorded with vintage equipment and preserved a rawness that studio polish would have destroyed.

The six tracks Ronson and Winehouse recorded together took five to seven days total. The album won five Grammy Awards in 2008. Winehouse, who was twenty-two when she recorded most of it, became the first British woman to win five Grammys in a single night. She died in July 2011. Back to Black is the kind of record where every song sounds like something that could only have come from one person, and that person is heard here at the full, devastating height of their gift.