Back To Black

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<b>100 Best Albums</b> 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. 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. What she reemerged with was masterful: bleak, funny, tough, hopelessly romantic. The choru, though, kept tripping him up because it didn’t rhyme: “We only said goodbye with word, I died a hundred time.” He asked her to change it, but she just gave him a blank look: That’s just how it came out, she didn’t know how to <i>change</i> it. For all her brashne, what makes <i>Back to Black</i> 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. The appeal to soul music is obvious: the Motown horns (“Rehab,” “Tears Dry on Their Own”), the girl-group romance (“Back to Black”), the organic quality of the arrangements (“You Know I’m No Good”)—much of it courtesy of Brooklyn outfit The Dap-King. .

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