My Tears Dry on Their Own

2011, Age 39. "Back to Black," by Amy Winehouse, from the album of the same name.

It would probably be difficult to overstate my love for Amy Winehouse.

I first heard her thanks to a free download on iTunes. The song was "You Know I'm No Good." I was so taken aback by the record. I couldn't believe something this soulful, this melodic, this groovy was coming out in 2007. The production was good. There were horns. The sound was so warm, it sounded like vinyl. And then there was her voice.

She sounded to me like Ronnie Spector with a British accent, and I hadn't seen her picture yet. I bought the CD as soon as it was available. Then I went looking for her back catalog only to find that this was just her second record and that her first, Frank, wasn't available in the U.S. Ebay searches revealed that people were paying $35 or more for a copy. I lucked out and got a copy at a record store in Austin while visiting my friends, Steve and Michelle. I also bought the B-sides of both of those records. And downloaded her cover of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" from iTunes. And several acoustic/alternate versions of songs.

I read cover stories about her in Rolling Stone and Mojo. I watched a Biography special about her. I played her records in my class. I played her for others, like my friend Kenya, until they were hooked, too. I accompanied one of my students singing "Love is a Losing Game" at our jazz cafe at school. I was a fan. I have even blogged about her previously.

Like all of her fans, I followed her tumultuous personal life through the media. It saddened me, but somehow I knew that this was part-and-parcel of her art, too.

I know there are those who reject this sort of thinking and are even angered by it. I will also add that I don't wish to romanticize her addictions and depression, nor suggest that these should be imitated by those hoping to achieve greatness. But you can hear it in her voice. There is very real pain coming through every note of that album. When people talk about soul, I think that is what they are hearing. It may not be necessary to be going through emotional turmoil while singing, but having that deep psychic well to draw from is an unquestionable artistic advantage.

This seems self-evident to me, however politically incorrect it is. Charlie Parker's genius, while perhaps not reliant on his turbulent inner life, was undoubtedly facilitated by it. I've heard countless musicians say, "Imagine what Bird might have done if he weren't on heroin," but the truth is, we don't know. While there have been many notable exceptions, one cannot look at music history without being struck by the many instances of depression and substance abuse.

I'm reading a good book right now called Touched by Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison. It's about instances of manic depression among artists and why bi-polar disorder seems to be such a frequent occurrence among that group. Jamison speculates that the emotional sensitivity that accompanies depression in its various forms is of real value to the artist. If there is also an attendant mania, the artist is able to tap into both the dark and light sides of her nature and work feverishly at times to produce works of exceptional beauty and power. To return to Bird as an example, it seems unthinkable that his legendary 16-hour practice days might have happened apart from a real mania.

Jamison also discusses the tendency of those who live with manic-depression to violate social mores and live on the edge of the culture. We love rock stars for this. When Cee-Lo sings, "My heroes had the heart to live their lives out on the limb," he is echoing something many of us feel. They take risks that many of us can't or won't. We secretly envy so much of their outrageous behavior and wonder if meeting Old Nick down by the crossroads might really be worth it after all. Drunken nights of debauchery and lost years are the stuff of rock legend. Winehouse certainly had that going for her and a great rock image to boot, covered in tattoos, beehive hairdo, cat-eye make-up and playing guitar.

I've speculated for some time about the issue of substance abuse among artists and I think that it is an under-discussed topic. Suggesting that it's only a physiological issue ignores what many of us know first hand. Creating art, especially performing, requires the artist to bring something deeply personal to the surface for everyone to see. This doesn't seem so hard when you are 17 and full of piss. But as you get older, your internal dialog begins to disrupt you, first saying things like, "Don't forget to use the forked F-sharp fingering in this passage." Then he grows more malevolent: "Everyone is embarrassed for you. They feel sorry for you. You should stop playing." Drinking makes that inner man shut up and lets you connect to your performance the way you used to, back when you were cocksure and the world was your oyster.

Apart from that, it's probably the way a lot of artists deal with depression. Amy Winehouse was famous for her alcoholism, but as she said, “I’m manic depressive. I’m not an alcoholic, which sounds like an alcoholic in denial.” You can hear this in her songwriting. "I don't ever wanna drink again, ooh, I just need a friend," she moans in "Rehab," the most notorious song from the album. But the album is thick with this insight into a very painful existence.

Her knowing self-deprecation in "You Know I'm No Good," is alluring as it is distressing to hear, the cheater rather than the cheated begging for a lover to stay, without asking or expecting forgiveness. "Love is a Losing Game" is at turns crass ("Five-story fire as you came") and grandiose ("Over futile odds and laughed at by the gods"). (This one has been my favorite for the last couple of years. Go look for the version with just Amy singing to Fender Rhodes accompaniment. As delightful as Mark Ronson's production is, with its Spectorish wall of sound throughout, this version is perfect and stripped to essentials.) "Tears Dry on Their Own" begins with arguably the best lyric on the album: "All I can ever be to you is the darkness that we knew, and this regret I got accustomed to."

It would be difficult to explain why I identify so closely with these songs. There are certainly elements in the songs that speak to my experience, though not many (although I always smile when she sings to her would-be rehabilitators, "There is nothing you can teach me that I can't learn from Mr. Hathaway.") When I'm going through my own "black" times, I listen to her album a lot.

It just so happens that I've been listening to it a lot this summer, for reasons that I won't go into here. I was eating lunch in Morgantown when I heard she was dead.

I almost wrote, "when I heard that she died," but that makes it sound like something that happened to her. Her death was certainly at her own hand, in one fashion or another. It struck me very hard, but of course, I was not surprised.

My grief at her death is two-fold. I'll go ahead and confess that it was, at first, a selfish grief. I was so upset that we would be hearing no more from this voice. I had been waiting anxiously for her next record and now it wasn't coming. The disease that gave her to us turned and killed her, just as it had other members of the "27 Club," along with Bird and Donny Hathaway, too.

Then I just grieved for her and what her life must have been. I know a bit about depression and have close friends who deal with it daily. Being a musician, it seems I know more than a handful, including many who have spent days and weeks crippled in a hospital, wrestling with their demons. And I've known a few, musicians and otherwise, who ended life at their own hands, whether intentionally or not. I felt like I understood something about what she went through and that type of emotional pain. I listened to her songs over and over again. And I cried. More than once.

Certainly there are more tragic deaths than Amy Winehouse's. I hope no one would infer than I find the death of a celebrity more heart-breaking than that of a soldier or any one of the thousands of children who die senselessly in our world every day due to war or hunger. But her death resonated with me particularly because it seemed itself representative of the pain of this life. I cried for her because she was able to express that for so many of us. As she sang in the title song from Back to Black, "I died a hundred times." Maybe this last time will be enough.