Amy Winehouse recorded one song alone at home in 2009. One take. She never released it Then she died
Amy Winehouse recorded one of the most emotional performances of her career alone in her house, just her and a guitar, in the spring of 2009. She recorded it in one take. She never released it. Two years later, the people who loved her found it on a hard drive and had to decide what to do with it. But to understand what that decision involved, what it cost, and what it meant, and why the people who made it are still talking about it, you need to understand what Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson found when they sat down in the
months after Amy’s death and listened to everything she had left behind. Amy had been recording since she was 19 years old. She had been in studios in Miami, in New York, in London, at Abbey Road, at Daptone’s house in Brooklyn, at her own home in Camden for over a decade. Some of what she had recorded had become Frank.
Some had become Back to Black. Some had been recorded for those albums and not included. Some had been recorded as experiments, as sketches, as the kind of thing that happens in studios when an artist is trying something out and the tape is still running. Some had been recorded alone at home with just a guitar and a microphone and the need to put something down before it shifted.
None of it had ever been meant to be heard by anyone except the people who were in the room. Salaam Remi had been Amy’s producer and collaborator since before Frank, since the Miami sessions in 2002, when they had ridden around in a rented convertible and found between them the outlines of what the music could be.
He had been in more studios with Amy than almost anyone else. He knew what she sounded like when she was performing for an audience and what she sounded like when she was just working something through. He knew the difference between a finished thing and an unfinished thing, and he had spent enough time with her recordings to have a calibrated sense of what she would and would not have wanted released.
What he found going through the archive in the months after July 2011 surprised him. The archive was not organized. It was not a curated collection of things Amy had set aside as potentially releasable. It was the accumulated output of a decade of recording by someone who had been in studios constantly, who had recorded everything, kept everything, treated the hard drives and the tapes as an extension of the notebooks where she wrote lyrics, a place to put things down rather than a place to store finished work.
There were sessions with producers she had worked with once and never again. There were recordings made on tour, in hotel rooms, on borrowed equipment. There were formal studio sessions where nothing had clicked. And informal home sessions where something extraordinary had happened by accident. >> The sheer volume of it was the first surprise.
The quality, distributed throughout that volume, was the second. What he found going through the archive in the months after July 2011 surprised him. Not because the quality was higher than expected. He had known she was extraordinary, had always known it. What surprised him was the range of what existed and the specific emotional texture of certain recordings that he had not heard before or had not heard in years.
There were studio outtakes that were, in his assessment, as good as or better than the versions that had ended up on the albums. There were alternate versions of songs that illuminated the originals from unexpected angles. Hearing the spare, stripped version of a song that had been given full orchestral treatment on the album changed what the orchestration meant, made the feeling beneath it more visible.
There were covers, standards that Amy had learned and recorded as exercises in the tradition she was working in. Songs by Leon Russell and Ray Charles and the girl groups of the 1960s that she had absorbed and made completely her own. And there was the home recording. A song for you was a song written by Leon Russell in 1970 and made famous by Donny Hathaway whose recording of it from 1971 had been one of Amy’s favorite pieces of music for as long as anyone who knew her could remember.
She had spoken about Hathaway with the reverence that she reserved for the artists who had shaped her most deeply, the way she spoke about Dinah Washington and Billie Holiday as people she felt she knew rather than figures she admired from a distance. His voice, his phrasing, the emotional directness of his recordings, all of it had been part of what she was trying to do from the beginning.
In the spring of 2009, in her house in London, she had sat down with her guitar and recorded a song for you alone, one take. She had not arranged it in advance, had not brought in a producer or a session musician or anyone to give the recording a professional context. She had simply played the song and sung it in the way that she sang things when there was nobody watching, without the performance that even the most honest public recording requires, without any calculation about how it would be received, with the specific quality of
someone doing something because they needed to do it and not for any other reason. It was, in Remi’s assessment, one of the most emotional performances she had ever given. He said this with the directness of someone who had been in the room for many of her best performances, who had heard her in the studio when the voice was at its peak and the feeling was completely present and the take was the one that everyone in the room recognized immediately as the one.
He had heard her do extraordinary things and he said this, a woman alone with a guitar in her house in 2009 was one of the most emotional things she had ever recorded. The decision to release it was not straightforward. The broader debate about what to do with Amy’s recordings had already been shaped by that point by the question of the third album, the 14 songs that Remi had said were right there, that David Joseph would announce in 2015 he had destroyed.
The Lioness project had been explicitly positioned by everyone involved as something different from the third album. Island’s co-president Ted Cockle had said directly when the album was announced that it was not the planned follow-up to Back to Black. It was not the record Amy had been making. It was a different thing, a collection of what had been hidden, a selection from the archive rather than a presentation of new work.
This framing was important. It was the difference between releasing an album that Amy had been building toward, work that was unfinished in the specific sense of not yet having been completed to her standard, and releasing recordings that existed complete in themselves as the results of sessions that had happened and been preserved.
A Song for You had been recorded in one take. It was not unfinished. It was exactly what it was, a performance captured, preserved on a hard drive in Amy’s house, waiting. Remi and Ronson compiled the album together with the consent and input of the Winehouse family. The process took several months. They listened to everything available from the decade between 2002 and 2011.
They made decisions about what deserved to be heard based not on commercial calculation, not on what would sell, or what would generate the most attention, but on what Remi described as the simple conviction that certain things were too good to leave on a hard drive. He used exactly those words. The music made no sense sitting on a hard drive withering away.
Not every recording in the archive met that standard, but certain things did. Body and Soul, the Abbey Road duet with Tony Bennett that Amy had recorded 4 months before she died, met it. A Song for You met it. The original demo version of Tears Dry on Their Own met it. The version recorded before the Ronettes sample was added that revealed the song’s skeleton in a way the finished recording did not.
The album was announced on October 31st, 2011, exactly 100 days after Amy died. It was titled Lioness: Hidden Treasures, taking the name of the record label Amy had founded in 2009. Island released it on December 2nd, 2011. The proceeds went to the Amy Winehouse Foundation. It debuted at number one in the United Kingdom.
It reached number five in the United States. It sold two and a half million copies. Critics approached it with the care that the circumstances required, aware that they were reviewing not just a record, but a decision. That every judgment about the music was also implicitly a judgment about whether it should have been released at all.
Most of them concluded that it should. The NME called it a beautiful and bittersweet collection that served as a fitting tribute. The Guardian noted that the recordings revealed dimensions of Amy’s artistry that the two studio albums had not fully captured, particularly her range as an interpreter of other people’s songs, the depth of her understanding of the jazz and soul tradition she was working in.
Rolling Stone said that for anyone who loved her music, Lioness was essential. The dissenting voices were not dismissive of the music. They were concerned about the precedent, about the industry’s relationship with the posthumous catalogs of dead artists, about whether the commercial incentive to release was ever truly separable from the artistic motivation to do so, about whether the grief of the people who had loved Amy could cloud the judgment of the people who were making decisions about her work.
These were legitimate concerns. They were not answered definitively by the album’s critical reception or its commercial success. They remained open as they remained open for every posthumous release by every artist who dies before finishing what they were making. Most of them concluded that it should. The consensus was not unanimous.
There were voices that questioned whether any posthumous release could be truly ethical, whether the absence of the artist’s explicit consent was an absence that commercial success could not compensate for. These were genuine concerns and they were not dismissed by the people who had made the album. Remi had thought about them.
Ronson had thought about them. The family had thought about them. The decision they had arrived at was not made carelessly or quickly. What tipped the balance in the end was A Song for You. That recording, one take, alone, guitar, in her house, the spring of 2009, was the argument for the album’s existence, not because it was the most polished thing on it, but because it was the most true.
It was Amy at her most completely herself, with no audience and no industry and no professional context to perform toward, singing a song by her favorite artist because she needed to sing it. The person who had made that recording died at 27. She had left behind a hard drive in a house in Camden and two men who had loved her and her music for a decade had sat in a room together and listened to what was on it and decided that certain things were too good to leave withering away.
The 12 tracks on Lioness told a story that neither Frank nor Back to Black had told. Not the story of an album with its deliberate arc and its carefully chosen sequence, but the story of an artist across a decade. The earliest recording on the album dated from 2002 when Amy was 19 and had not yet released anything.
The latest was Body and Soul, recorded at Abbey Road in March 2011, 4 months before she died. Between those two points was everything. The development of the voice, the deepening of the interpretive skill, the widening of the emotional range. You could hear across those recordings someone becoming more completely herself year by year.
That was what Remi and Ronson had found in the archive and had decided deserve to be heard. Not a collection of offcuts or commercial opportunities, a portrait. The portrait of someone who had been recording music for 10 years with the same honesty and the same refusal to be other than what she was, who had done this in formal studios and hotel rooms and her own house in Camden in the spring of 2009 with just a guitar and one take, and who had in all of those different contexts been exactly the same person.
She had never meant for anyone to hear it, but she had also, as Remi noted, never sang a song the same way twice, which meant that every recording she had ever made was in some sense the only version of itself that would ever exist. There was no other take of a song for you.
There was no other morning in the spring of 2009 when she sat alone in her house and sang to nobody, and the voice came out the way it came out that day. It exists because someone kept the hard drive. It was released because two producers decided it deserved to be heard. Whether Amy would have agreed is the question that cannot be answered, but the recording is there and it sounds like her, completely, undeniably, irreducibly her.
And in a catalog that ends at 27 years old, that is not nothing. It is in fact very nearly everything.
