When the Skinny Lady Sings

The word ‘pop’ seems designed to trivialise something that, in the mouth of a great artist, is capable of being just about as heavy as anything in the world can be.

This is the text of a commentary I wrote for an exhibition on the life and work of Amy Winehouse, staged at the New York Encounter in the Metropolitan Pavilion, Manhattan, for the last three days. 

A song is a message. But from whom to whom, from where to where, from what to what? 

It’s a message from heart to heart. 

It’s not a decoration. Not an adornment. Not a soundtrack.

The song is a medium for saying things that common speech has ceased to communicate. And it communicates whatever-it-is in a kind of encrypted code that protects itself by the camouflaging of the song, the better to reach its destination safely. The song is a kind of Trojan Horse that gets into the heart of the city of Man, — the heart of man in the city he has constructed to close the Mystery out. 

The song therefore has the potential to attain very high levels of sacredness. But a sacredness that is rarely acknowledged, that is in a sense forbidden to be named — that dare not speak its name. 

The song is a script. It does not become ‘the song’ until it is sung. The songwriter is always secondary to the art of the song, since the song exists only in the moments when it is being sung. Then it belongs to whom — the singer? 

No, actually, for the singer belongs to the song. The song occupies the singer qua singer, so that the two become a single entity.

Then, when everything is as it should be, the song sings the singer.

In a film of the life of the Irish tenor John Count McCormack, the lead role is played by McCormack himself. In one scene, he seeks to explain to his accompanist what he is trying to achieve — the difference between merely ‘singing’ and becoming unified with the song. He says: ‘You have to have the yarragh in your voice.’

Yarragh is an Irish word, a kind of fusion of several words that are not quite words at all. It contains something of the exclamation ‘Arra!’, a kind of cry of recognition, sometimes delivered in grief, sometimes frustration, sometimes joy — as when meeting an old friend. There is also present something of a ‘Yes’. The yarragh is both plea and affirmation, which begins at a moment at which a change has entered in, a point where the words and notes and sounds have together become what Patrick Kavanagh — the author of one of the world’s greatest songs, On Raglan Road — characterised as ‘airborne.’ The yarragh is the quality in sung music that enables that strange, mysterious process by which the singer enters a song so completely that the song acquires the life of the singer for itself. It is really the ultimate distillation of the singer’s life and the art that has touched him: the blues, jazz, poems, words, thoughts, dreams — all channelled into a voice capable of, as the American rock writer Greil Marcus, writing about Van Morrison, described as ‘striking a note so exalted you can’t believe a human being is responsible for it, a note so unfinished and unsatisfied you can understand why the eternal seems to be riding on its back.’ 

In his book, When that Rough God Comes Riding, Listening to Van Morrison, Marcus wrote that getting the yarragh meant acquiring a sense of the song as a thing in itself, ‘with its own brain, heart, lungs, tongue and ears’ — and its own ‘desires, fears, will and even ideas.’ The question might really be, as Morrison himself put it: ‘Is the song singing you?’ If it isn’t, either singer or song is failing to meet the yarragh test. 

The yarragh demands a quality in the singer that cannot be achieved with any ordinary song. It occurs in the singing of special songs, songs that exist for no earthly purpose other than to become vehicles for the sacrament of the yarragh. The quality that renders possible the yarragh depends on the capacity of the song to be both intimate and universal in the same moment. 

The process might be imagined as something like a match put to a fire that is already set, smouldering on the remains of yesterday, ready to be ignited. The flames catch, and for a moment the match is king, the source of ignition. But then the dry tinder catches and WHOOSH. The match becomes insignificant. The fire takes off. The fire is the singer being sung. The flame is the song but the energy has transferred itself to something else. SomeONE.  Some ‘one.’ Touched by the right song — a song that ignites her desire, her longing, her sorrow  — the singer comes to life in an unprecedented, unique way.  The ‘song’ is the expression of emotions that are felt intrinsically, in the interiority of the person, which are in a sense given life by the song. This is what we hear when we listen to a song sung in this way. This is why we have to stop what we are doing and think about nothing. 

Take the song Valerie, which became Amy Winehouse’s most famous, most successful (what you might call) ‘hit single’. 

This song was a kind of accident. It was first released on a 2006 album of her producer, Mark Ronson, a kind of all-star covers collection of indie songs, titled Version.  Ronson had produced Back to Black, and they had become friends. He was working on an album of indie reinterpretations and wanted to have Amy on the album. 

Lots of people imagine she wrote the song herself, but it’s actually more interesting than that. The song was an original of the Liverpool indie band the Zutons, who used to play sometimes in a pub near where Amy lived in London. Ronson asked her if she could think of a suitable song and she sang Valerie for him, right there. He didn’t know the song, although it had been a top ten hit in the UK for the Zutons, and wasn’t actually crazy about it.  But he wanted Amy to be on his album so he agreed and it became a last-minute addition. ‘The first time I heard it, I was like, “Um, OK.” I didn’t get it. Obviously she did, because she’d sung it in the shower and she knew the ins and outs of that song, and what a great song it was.’ Within five minutes they were recording the song with the same musicians — the Dap-Kings — who had played on Back to Black. But, strangely, this was the first time she had met them, because for that album Ronson had arranged the songs with her separately in New York and she had had to go back to London while he worked on the backing tracks with the band. 

They had done several takes in an attempt to get a decent version of the song, but nobody was totally sold on the exercise. The bank members were packing up but Ronson was still dubious. The version they’d done was kind of mellow, downtempo. As the musicians were putting their instruments back in their cases, he said, ‘Ah! Could we just try one way where it’s just like . . .  I know it’s dumb, but where it’s like, bonk-chik-a-bonk, like an oversimplified version?’  He was having difficulty articulating what he meant. Then he said: ‘Could we do one with the You Can’t Hurry Love beat?’ Everyone was grimacing at this and getting a little peeved after their long day at the office, but they took their instruments out anyway and did what he said. ‘They probably did two takes, and it was great — and that’s the version, the one that people know,’ as Ronson later recalled it. 

Here’s where it gets interesting.  It’s strange — unusual — for a straight woman to sing a song with the name of another woman as the title. Amy was not gay — there is no suggestion of anything like that. And, strangely, not even the sleazy British tabloids ever tried to suggest such a thing.  As far as its inspiration goes, the song is a pretty standard ‘missing-you’ song. It was written by the Zutons’ lead singer and frontman Dave McCabe, about a make-up artist from Florida called Valerie Star, with whom he was romantically involved but couldn’t get to see because she had gotten herself into complicated trouble with the law and couldn’t leave the US. Driving offences, unpaid speeding tickets, bench warrant and so on — nothing too sinister. The Zutons’ video of the song has a prison vibe. It’s an interesting track, but it’s still just another moon-in-June song, about how every minute is like a century because I can’t be with you, my love, and so on and so on. 

And this song, which most people would decide is a ‘man’s song’ — a song in the voice of a man singing about a woman — becomes, from the mouth of Amy Winehouse, an entirely different kind of song. Even though she doesn’t change any of the words, it becomes, in the embrace of her voice, a song about existential loneliness, a song that expresses something close to despair, but in a manner that seems to clothe it in a jauntiness that might cause you to miss what the singer is saying. The jauntiness is entirely in the beat, which to be totally fair is another piece of genius, though not for the sake of the backing track — because it forces Amy to find a way around the backing track to find what she knows the song is really trying to say. 

The great American music writer Greil Marcus — actually at the time speaking specifically about Amy Winehouse not long after her death in 2011 — though not about this song — said something very interesting about cover versions and singers: 

‘Just because you write a song, just because you’re the author of a song doesn’t mean that you understand everything about that song. Any artist — whether it’s a painter, whether it’s a writer, or whether it’s a musician — will tell you, ‘I didn’t know where that came from’ — where that image came from, where that lyric came from, where that melodic change came from. It just was somehow there, but I didn’t have any conscious intent to make this happen, I didn’t really write that. It was just there, and I was able to grab it, or stop it.’ So a piece of work that you write down when you’re a singer, is not gonna reveal itself just by looking at it. It’s not obvious.’ 

And also, of course, as he also noted, a song can lie around for decades and not become itself — even appear to be a nothing song —  because no one has sung it to the fullness of its potential. 

The key words in Valerie, I claim, are in two lines, which begin the song and also bring it to a close:

Well sometimes I go out by myself

And I look across the water

This is the only repeated verse in the song, the image that defines it — starting it and ending it. 

The two versions —Amy’s and the Zutons’ — are structurally the same. Amy didn’t change anything. 

You can imagine her sitting in her local pub, watching this band performing this song and feeling something in it that they had failed to notice. 

In the original the song has a very particular meaning: The songwriter is thinking of, let us say, his beloved. He is in Liverpool, or maybe London, and he stands by the docks or the seaside and looks across the ocean towards where he imagines Florida might roughly be located. This is the kind of thing songwriters do: a bit of melodrama, for which songwriters have a special licence and enjoy from the listener a special suspension of cynicism:  The unrequited lover confronted by the uncrossable ocean between him and his beloved. Except in this case the song is not meant to be desperate because it is the law, not unrequitedness that stands between.  It’s naturally a kind of lighthearted song —self-pity for the enjoyment of self-pity, which of course is considerable.  

But when Amy sings the line it is stripped of all this sentimentality, this lachrymose, self-conscious, maybe even ironic self-pity. Here it becomes a raw cry. There is no reason why she looks across the water, except a different meaning to the original. There is no one there. She is bereft. Her desire has no answer, no correspondence that she knows of. The water is both a limit and a threat, an instrument, perhaps, even of self-destruction. All this we can see in retrospect, which is always terrible. From her mouth this song conforms to St Thomas’s definition of sadness: the ‘desire for an absent good,’ but we are uncertain of the precise nature of the good. Friendship, perhaps. Company. Accompaniment. Respite. Reprieve. 

The very fact that it is Amy, a straight woman, singing the song, makes us stop and pay attention. It becomes unsurprising that Mark Ronson missed the Zutons’s version, which was fine, but in the way most pop songs are fine, not the ‘fine’ that Amy brings to it. You might well hear that version and forget it instantly. Not this. 

‘This’ becomes an expression of something we ‘like’ or ‘enjoy’ not because of the pleasure it gives us but because we recognise it as a cry that echoes something in ourselves — a crying out in the midst of the mysteriousness of our situation for some understanding of why we are here and where we go. 

And I think of all the things, what you're doing

And in my head I paint a picture

The words are the same as in the original but here the song moves to a new level of sorrow, moving close to desperation. 

Won't you come on over

Stop making a fool out of me

Why don't you come on over Valerie?

And then she does something that doesn’t happen in the original, in which the name is sung once or sometimes twice between the stanzas, desultorily, like a time-filler. Amy does something different, yet within the same structure. She repeats the name — three more times, with audible question marks, like a plea. 

Valerie? [Question mark] Valerie? {question mark] Valerie? [question mark] 

Question marks. Like Valerie isn’t listening. 

No, actually. Not quite that. Like she knows Valeris is listening but may be ignoring her cry? Maybe pretending not to hear. 

Can you hear me Valerie? Echo answers: Valerie?

Not Valerie Star, of course. Not any person. Every person and no person. The absent Other. 

There is no melodrama, ironic or otherwise, in her rendition. If you watch her when she is really paying attention to the song — as opposed to ‘performing’ it — she is actively trying to suppress rather than expand her expression. In this way she squeezes out the deeper, overlooked emotions of the song. 

When Amy sings, it’s real. 

Our basically sick media cause us very often to miss everything. A great singer is capable of carrying the immense pain of the human condition and giving it back to humanity in the form of a capsule of emotion that is the song sung properly. But in our reduced culture, she is presented as an ‘entertainer,’ a ‘rocker,’ a ‘celebrity’ and so on. But really there is a different process at work, a process on which the misunderstanding imposes a short-circuit in comprehension — and this can sometime prove fatal. 

An artist like Winehouse can become reduced, perhaps even in her own mind, to a ‘performer’ or, worse, ‘entertainer’. If you were writing a standard ‘gig review’ of a performance by her, you might say something like: ‘Amy was essentially a jazz singer, who had moved on from her early pop formation to enter the pantheon of the great jazz singers even while she was still alive’. And so on.  

But really, she was a shaman, a medium, channelling through her frail frame and structure the pain and potential of human experience at full power, and bearing witness to the mysteries that make this condition bearable in their capacity for expression. She was as though a filament cast in some fragile, flimsy, almost non-existent alloy of flesh and spirit, who lit up when she sang with the ache and tenderness of being human. She was wounded, not because she abused herself, but because she was called to be the voice of the walking wounded, which is to say the totally human. On behalf of this humanity, she begged in song for answers and reassurance.

And there was always this sense that her slight frame was just about able to take the voltage of this desiring, that it was a close run thing.  

Desire is not best understood by its specific object at any moment. It is a thing in itself, the very propulsion mechanism of the human, and ultimately is for something that might — to avoid further short-circuits — be called Home, which is where? Well, ‘across the water’ is an interesting characterisation. 

The great British rock writer Paul Morley, in his book, Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City, wrote about the words of a pop song disappearing into themselves ‘as though boiled down, as if they are changing from solid to liquid, forming a sensuous, absorbing musical form that implies how all music began with the human voice. The sound of the human voice imitating sounds around us; the sounds of nature, animals, even the sound of silence. The sound of the human voice copying the voice of God.’

This is beautiful and interesting, but I don’t think it is quite right. I think the procedure is more about seeking a voice to speak about the desire for what we call God while not seeming too holy, and in the modern context especially, this implies not mentioning the word . . . ‘God.’ This is our central problem culturally speaking. Of course this is something we are not supposed to say in such a context, and doing so lends one to the risk of being shot at from both sides. This is the unwritten contract. This aspect is not even to be acknowledged as implicit. It is there and is supposed to work without either party knowing what is happening. And it does, at least in public. Hence, the Trojan Horse. 

For the artist/musician the rock ‘n’ roll ‘product’ begins life as the most private thing. The heart looks to itself and searches for words and notes and sounds to speak of something that is as far from noise and glitz and distraction as is possible to imagine. And then, constructed within an idiom that manages to convey the original impulse and yet encrypt it in a form that can give rise also to the most radical misunderstandings, the song travels though a thousand circuits and channels, via innumerable wires, negotiating the paraphernalia of the world’s most fashion-obsessed business, kneaded by the hands of accountants and technicians, until finally it is decoded in the heart of the waiting listener.

Outwardly reduced to ‘showbusiness’ and ‘entertainment’, the holiness of the song is forced inwards into a closed circuit, a communicating and receiving that becomes mistakable for something else — and deniable in its true nature. When the singer opens her mouth, a vital process occurs: a stirring of hearts and souls. But, in describing this, we resort to technicalities and more clichés. We praise the artist, but in a way that implies she simply replicates, perhaps by mimicry or pretence, some established form, and award her points for execution and intensity. We speak of ‘soulfulness,’ but the clue in the word goes in one ear and out the other. We note the existence of ‘passion,’ but seem at a loss as to what the passion might be for, if indeed anything. Thus, the artist is caught in a bind: She is of the heavens and yet not permitted to comprehend or believe it. And we must join her in the celebration of something that is, above all, not to be acknowledged in its deepest meanings. 

This is a recipe for catastrophe, for the singer carries within herself a raging fire that she does not understand. 

In spite of cultural hostility, the medium of modern popular music has in some instances become modern culture’s most unlikely vehicles for the most fundamental desiring of man.  This notion becomes especially explosive in a time when it becomes increasingly plausible that the musics we call ‘pop’ and ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ were introduced into culture for the purposes of manipulation, diversion and exploitation. This makes of a singer like Amy Winehouse the most unexpected kind of subversive. When the skinny lady sings, almost always, something strange and beautiful occurs, and at some level the listeners, perhaps imagining themselves to be simply ‘enjoying themselves,’ are moved to the deepest degree. 

For in the very best of the music that we call by these names is something that goes beyond the ostensible content, something disproportionate that might be said to conform to St Thomas’ definition: sadness as the natural state of the human — waiting, expecting, missing. 

The root of all this in Gospel music is in this context somewhat uncontroversial. But the Blues is mainly nowadays interpreted as vacillating between sexual obsession and nihilism. Yet, in the work of a great artist in the medium we can see how even these forms — perhaps especially these forms — can become vehicles for the infinite longing of man.  For example, the affective relationship between man and woman is itself a reflection of the human desire for the infinite, and many rock ‘n’ roll songs use this motif as the means of creating a vehicle for the expression of the ultimate desiring, without the authors or perfomers necessarily knowing what is happening. 

In the best of this music is something that goes beyond the ostensible content, something disproportionate, as in Valerie from the mouth of Amy Winehouse.

To Know Him Is To Love Him

Greil Marcus talks about Amy and about her art or craft of getting inside a song, and finding something that nobody ever even suspected might be  there: ‘She did that throughout her career, but it never came home to me until, after she died, an album came out called Amy Winehouse at the BBC. It was just a collection of recordings of her BBC-sponsored concerts, mostly. But at the very end of this album, there’s a performance that she recorded in a DJ studio.

‘She’s got a new album out, she’s going around giving interviews to DJs, and she’s willing to perform right there in the studio if they want it. She comes with a couple of musicians. . . . 

‘And, I heard this song, To Know Him is to Love Him, and I was just flabbergasted. To Know Him is to Love Him was one of the corniest, most embarrassing early rock ‘n’ roll hits, from 1958. It was Phil Specter’s first record from Los Angeles. And it was this lugubrious, treacly, very well produced record, with Phil Specter.’

Marcus describes how the backing singers go ‘da-da-dah, da-da-dah,’ and the vocalists sings, ‘To know . . .  know . . .  know . . . . him is to love . . .  love . . .  love him, and I do and I do . . .’ 

‘And you know,’ he says, ‘it’s a catchy song. And I remember being 13 years old and listening to it and being embarrassed with myself, listening to it, because I couldn’t turn it off — it was just too . . . enticing somehow. 

‘So here is Amy Winehouse . . .  I want you to hear what she does with this, the way she makes deep soul music out of this corny little ditty, this corny little teenage song, the way she makes it into a Blues, the way she makes it about death. Let’s listen to that.  This is from 2006. You know, you can imagine her listening to the original record, and saying, “There’s more to this song than these people ever knew. I’m going to find out what it is.” And you reach a point where the only way to understand this song — what it has, what it could say — is to sing it, to perform it. And that’s no guarantee that you will find the secrets that song holds, or be able to communicate them to other people, but that’s exactly what happened here.’

Back to Black

Marcus spoke also about the Asif Kapadia Movie, Amy, a documentary about her life, and a moment in that film where she is recording the title song, Back to Black. 

He describes it like this: 

‘And she’s in the recoding studio and she’s in a tiny alcove, and she’s kind of scrunched, singing in this half-closet, isolated from everything that’s going on around her. She sings the song, and it’s kind of her most intense, defeated, despairing, final kind of song. And she gets to the end of it, and the end is ‘back, back, back,’ and as she performs it, as she records it, its ‘back’, and there’s a full three seconds . . . ‘back’, and another three seconds . . .  ‘back’ . . . and that’s the end of it. And when the song is finished, she says, ‘It got a little upsetting there at the end, didn’t it?’ In other words, for the first time, this song revealed itself to her, as she sang it. She understood in a way that she’s hadn’t quite before, just how dangerous and how, ahm . . . threatening  this song actually was. It’s very rare to see that happen with a performer, with an artist, with a creative person – to see that person understanding what she’s done. Bob Dylan once said about his song, Like a Rolling Stone: “It was like a ghost came and gave me the song, and then the ghost went away and left it.”

‘You know: I didn’t write it, that feeling. And that’s probably the most melodramatic or mystical description of that absolutely commonplace experience for any creative person. A creative person opens herself up to the world. She allows the world to invade her.’s

I would go further. Is it really the ‘world’ that invades? Surely not. The world is what tries to distract from what is most true, what is most real, the ultimate true source of the inspiration and the desiring: The deep nature of sorrow, which relates to the state of exile, which all of us feel but only the truly great are gifted with expressing.