Back to Black
Back to Black is the second and final studio album by the English singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, released on 27 October 2006 by Island Records. Winehouse predominantly based the album on her tumultuous relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil, who temporarily left her to pursue an ex-girlfriend. Their brief separation spurred Winehouse to create an album that explores themes of guilt, grief, infidelity, heartbreak and trauma in a relationship.
Influenced by the pop and soul music of 1960s girl groups, Winehouse collaborated with producers Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson, along with Sharon Jones' band The Dap-Kings, to assist her on capturing the sounds from that period while blending them with contemporary R&B and neo-soul music. Between 2005 and 2006, she recorded the album's songs with Remi at Instrumental Zoo Studios in Miami and then with Ronson and the Dap-Kings at Chung King Studios and Daptone Records in New York. Tom Elmhirst mixed the album at Metropolis Studios in London. The album was promoted with five singles: "Rehab", "You Know I'm No Good", "Back to Black", "Tears Dry on Their Own" and "Love Is a Losing Game".
Back to Black sold 20 million copies worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time and the UK's second best-selling album of the 21st century. It received widespread acclaim from music critics, who praised Winehouse's songwriting, emotive singing style, and Remi and Ronson's production. At the 2008 Grammy Awards, Back to Black won Best Pop Vocal Album and was also nominated for Album of the Year. At the same ceremony, Winehouse won four additional awards, tying her with five other artists as the second-most awarded female in a single ceremony. The album was also nominated at the 2007 Brit Awards for MasterCard British Album and was short-listed for the 2007 Mercury Prize, among other accolades.
Recognized as a key recording in the widespread popularity of British soul throughout the late 2000s, Back to Black established Winehouse as a cultural icon and appears in numerous lists of the greatest albums of all time. In 2025, it was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry as a "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" work.
Background
After signing with Island Records in 2002, Winehouse released her debut album, Frank, on 20 October 2003. She dedicated the album to her ex-boyfriend, Chris Taylor, as she gradually lost interest in him. Produced mainly by Salaam Remi, many songs were influenced by jazz, and apart from two cover versions, every song was co-written by Winehouse. The album received positive reviews, with compliments over the "cool, critical gaze" in its lyrics, while her vocals drew comparisons to Sarah Vaughan, Macy Gray and others.The album reached number 13 on the UK Albums Chart at the time of its release, and has been certified triple Platinum by the British Phonographic Industry. In 2004, Winehouse was nominated for British Female Solo Artist and British Urban Act at the Brit Awards, while Frank made the shortlist for the Mercury Prize. That same year, the album's first single, "Stronger Than Me", earned Winehouse and Remi an Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song. In a 2004 interview with The Observer, Winehouse expressed dissatisfaction with the album, stating that "some things on album go to a little place that's fucking bitter". She further notes that the marketing was "fucked", the promotion was "terrible", and everything was "a shambles".
In 2005, Winehouse dated Blake Fielder-Civil, who was an assistant on music video sets. Around the same time, she rediscovered the 1960s music she loved as a girl, stating in a 2007 Rolling Stone interview: "When I fell in love with Blake, there was Sixties music around us a lot." In 2005, the couple spent a lot of time in a local Camden bar, and during their time there, Winehouse would listen to blues, '60s girl groups, and Motown artists, explaining that "it was local" and "spent a lot of time there playing pool and listening to jukebox music." The music heard in the bar appealed to Winehouse when she was writing songs for her second album.
Around the same year, she went through a period of drinking, heavy drug use, and weight loss. People who saw her during the end of that year and early 2006 reported a rebound that coincided with the writing of Back to Black. Her family believes that the mid-2006 death of her grandmother, who was a stabilising influence, set her off into addiction. Fielder-Civil then left Winehouse to revert to his previous girlfriend. During their break, she would write the bulk of the album on the state of her "relationship at the time with Blake " through themes of "grief, guilt, and heartache". Winehouse dated musician Alex Clare briefly in 2006, and would later return to and marry Fielder-Civil in the following year.
Recording and production
Most of the songs on Back to Black were solely written by Winehouse, as her primary focus of the album's sound shifted more towards the style of the girl groups from the 1950s and 1960s. Winehouse worked with New York singer Sharon Jones's longtime band, the Dap-Kings, to back her up in the studio and on tour. Her father, Mitch Winehouse, relates in his memoir, Amy, My Daughter, how fascinating watching her process was, especially with witnessing her perfectionism in the studio. She would also put out what she had sung on a CD and play it in his taxi outside to know how most people would hear her music.In 2005, Winehouse returned to Miami to record five songs at Salaam Remi's Instrumental Zoo Studios: "Tears Dry on Their Own", "Some Unholy War", "Me & Mr Jones", "Just Friends", and "Addicted". The recording process of Remi's album portion was "intimate", consisting of Winehouse singing while on guitar and Remi adding the other instruments played mostly by himself, or by instrumentalist Vincent Henry.
Winehouse and producer Mark Ronson both shared a publishing company, which encouraged a meeting between the two. They conversed in March 2006 in Ronson's New York studio that he used to have. They worked on six tracks together: "Rehab", "Back to Black", "You Know I'm No Good", "Love Is a Losing Game", "Wake Up Alone", and "He Can Only Hold Her". Ronson said in a 2010 interview with The Guardian that he liked working with Winehouse because she was blunt when she did not like his work. She in turn thought that when they first met, he was a sound engineer and that she was expecting an "older man with a beard".
Ronson wrote "Back to Black" the night after he met Winehouse, explaining in a 2010 Mojo interview:
I just thought, 'Let's talk about music, see what she likes.' She said she liked to go out to bars and clubs and play snooker with her boyfriend and listen to the Shangri-Las. So she played me some of those records... I told her that I had nothing to play her right now but if she me work on something overnight she could come back tomorrow. So I came up with this little piano riff, which became the verse chords to 'Back to Black.' Behind it I just put a kick drum and a tambourine and tons of reverb.
Mark Ronson later recalled the Back to Black recording sessions in a 2015 The FADER interview:
Amy was so serious about her words. Working on "Back to Black", when she first sang the chorus, she said, We only said goodbye in words/ I died a hundred times. My producer instinct went off and I said, "Hey, sorry, it's got to rhyme. That's weird. Can you fix that?" And she just looked at me like I was crazy, like, "Why would I fix that? That's what came out." They're some of the most unlikely lyrics you could ever imagine on a massive pop single.
Winehouse's father later recalled the formulation of "Rehab" in his memoir:
One day decided to take a quick stroll around the neighborhood because Amy wanted to buy Alex Clare a present... on the way back Amy began telling Mark about being with Blake , then not being with Blake and being with Alex instead. She told him about the time at my house after she'd been in hospital when everyone had been going on at her about her drinking: 'You know they tried to make me go to rehab, and I told them, no, no, no.' 'That's quite gimmicky,' Mark replied. 'It sounds hooky. You should go back to the studio and we should turn that into a song.'The majority of the songs produced by Ronson were completed at Daptone Records—along with the instrumental help of The Dap-Kings—in Brooklyn, New York. Three of the horn players from the group played a baritone saxophone, a tenor saxophone, and a trumpet. Ronson recorded the trio to create the "'60s-sounding metallics" on the album. The drums, piano, guitar, and bass were all done together in one room, with the drums being recorded with one microphone. There was also much spill between the instruments. Additional production of the album was located at Chung King and Allido Studios in New York City, and at Metropolis Records in London. In the Allido studio, Ronson used synthesisers and vintage keyboards to display the sound landscape for the album, including the Wurlitzer electric piano. In May of that year, Winehouse's demo tracks such as "You Know I'm No Good" and "Rehab" appeared on Mark Ronson's New York radio show on East Village Radio. These were some of the first new songs played on the radio after the release of "Pumps" and both were slated to appear on her second album. The 11-track album, completed in five months, was produced entirely by Remi and Ronson, with the production credits being split between them.
Post-production
, who mixed the single "You Know I'm No Good", was enlisted to help with the mixing of the album at Metropolis Records. He first received Ronson's original mix, which he described as being "radical in terms of panning, kind of Beatlesque". He continued, "The drums, for instance, were all panned to one side". He attempted to mix "Love Is a Losing Game" in the same manner he did with "Rehab", but felt it was not right to do so. Elmhirst mixed "Rehab", but when he first received the multitrack of the song, many tracks remained unused. Therefore, Ronson went to London to record strings, brass and percussion in one of Metropolis' tracking rooms.After these instruments were added, the song had garnered a "retro, '60s soul, R&B" feel to it. Elmhirst added a contemporary sound to the song as well, while Ronson wanted to keep the mix sparse and not overproduced. The album was mastered by Stuart Hawkes at Metropolis.