AMY WINEHOUSE (THE COLLECTION)
1. Our Day Will Come
2. Between The Cheats
3. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow
4. Like Smoke (feat. Nas)
5. The Girl From Ipanema
6. Best Friends, Right
7. Fool's Gold
8. Half Time
9. Do Me Good
10. Close To The Front
11. 'Round Midnight
12. Valerie
13. Someone To Watch Over Me
14. Body And Soul (feat. Tony Bennett)
15. You're Wondering Now
16. Hey Little Rich Girl
(feat. Zalon Thompson & Ade Omotayo)
17. Monkey Man
18. Cupid
19. What It Is
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When singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse died in her sleep on July 23, 2011, she took her third album with her. It was fully written, and she'd even done a photoshoot for the artwork earlier that year, but only a song and a half had made it into the studio during a brief pause in her substance abuse patterns in 2008. Surprisingly, masses of people were unsurprised; the tabloid factory had been thrashing viciously at her heels for years, uncompassionately feeding her private struggles into the lucrative mass media machine; she couldn't even enter the United States for an industry award event during her aforementioned period of sobriety because the substance abuse was so widely known as to be nearly synonymous with her name, and a disastrous concert less than two months before her departure from the material plane had only garnered her more scathing criticism from the peanut gallery.
But before the year was out, a new album hit the storefronts. Entitled Lioness: Hidden Treasures, it was a cherry-picked selection of her best studio performances left in the vault, as decided by her two main producers alongside the family that both loved and exploited her. Recorded across Winehouse's entire decade-long career, it comprised of the two numbers from 2008 (with her friend Nas, the rapper, adding two excellent verses to the unfinished song), leftovers from her 2003 debut record Frank, select covers, two early versions of songs on her mainstream breakout LP Back To Black (2006), and her final studio recording, a collaboration with her crooner idol Tony Bennett for his duet album. Despite the amount of love and care put into the record by her grieving producer Salaam Remi, few have found this album to be flawlessly crafted, including myself. My criticisms are as follows; the early versions of the Back To Black songs are inferior to the final cuts and are thus entirely superfluous; the closing track, a cover of "A Song For You," is a complete mess wherein a spontaneous and shambolic home demo with Amy on the brink of sobbing was overdubbed posthumously into a lush production, with the results ending up understandably stilted; and the song flow gets worse as the album progresses. So, because of the unsatisfactory nature of this release, I decided to create a revision.
The American cover of Back To Black (2006).
As is hopefully evident from the introduction, this is not her third album because that will never exist in finished form. Amy Winehouse (The Collection) is instead a mop-up compilation of her leftover songs (half written by her and half covers), including her B-sides and much of Lioness. It's a double album's worth of lushly produced Amy Winehouse songs that showcase all sides of her singing, from her usual R&B to jazz, ska, pop, and reggae. As usual, the song flow has been carefully refined and was designed so as to smoothly glide from one genre to the next. There's no song overlap with her two studio albums, because this compilation is intended to serve as a companion piece to them, and indeed the title and cover art were chosen in order to make it abundantly clear that this is not another studio record. So, that all for now; enjoy the music!
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