Song of the Day 5/24: Amy Winehouse, “Love Is a Losing Game”

Guest post by Nathan Arizona

We’ve heard a whole lot about Amy Winehouse’s troubled behavior before she died of alcohol poisoning in 2011 at age 27. It sounds like we learn more than we need to about her personal relationships in the new biographical movie “Back to Black.”

But you know what would good to hear more about? Her status as one of the great pop and even jazz vocalists of her time.

She never made a pure jazz album — file her under pop. But jazz influenced everything she sang. She was a jazz singer’s daughter who performed relentlessly around the house as a child singing that and pretty much every other kind music. She cited the great jazz singer Dinah Washington as her biggest influence. Late in her brief career she sang duets with Tony Bennett.

“Winehouse certainly had technique to spare,” wrote prominent jazz critic Ted Gioia. “She could bend notes with perfect control, but also hit them cleanly when the context requires it.” She reminded him of Billie Holiday “and I pretty much never hand out compliments like that.”

Her first album, “Frank,” approached pure jazz. Her second – and only other – album, “Back to Black,” was more clearly pop and it soared up the pop charts. But jazz touches remained, as did the influence of soul and ’60s girl groups, to which her beehive hairdo paid homage.

The “Back to Black” album made her a star. It was produced by Mark Ronson, a prodigious hitmaker at the time.

Amy was arguably the best of the many young female pop singers around then. She was eccentrically attractive, but not really one of the so-called “pop-tarts.” Temptations to addiction followed her success and they killed her, but she usually seemed a good soul while it was happening. Her’s was one of the saddest
celebrity deaths. Maybe if she had gone back ro rehab . . . .

“Love Is a Losing Game” was a hit from “Back to Black.” She wrote the song, which is basically about feeling sad that boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil had left her. He soon returned and they even got married, but that didn’t turn out well either. Consider him one of those English bounders.

This was the first song Ronson mixed for the album, and he fretted about how Amy would respond. “She had her head down on the mixing board, so I couldn’t gauge her reaction, thinking if she doesn’t like it we’re pretty fucked. At the end of it she looks up and walks over, extends her arms and gives me a huge hug. ‘I love it. Just take the harp off after the second verse. It sounds like some Maria Carey bullshit.’ ”

This acoustic performance of “Love Is a Losing Game” on an Irish TV show really shines a light on her vocals.

She shows her range in this concert performance of the rock song “Valerie,” which had been a hit for the British indie group the Zutons.

There’s a moody girl group feel to this official video of the title track from “Back to Black.” Shangri-Las?