Amy Winehouse – Back To Black lyrics

The man she is in love with has left her for his ex or has returned back to his wife. He left no time to regret about ending his relationship with her and just bounced straight back to the other woman, he kept his d••k wet with his same old safe bet, so he was still sleeping with the other woman.
Her life is like a pipe and she is the tiny penny rolling and spiralling down without control.
Everytime he says goodbye and leaves her, it feels like she is dying inside and goes back to a dark place.

@ Nathan Perry. I feel your interpretation is spot on. Thank you for sharing your experience and vulnerability to encourage others to seek help for the same problem. Go you! As I see this post is from 2015, I can only hope you are still clean and sober and alive. Bless!

This song is about Amy being able to only be comforted during her time of loss, loneliness and grief, by the one thing that made her feel human at the time. Black is slang for heroin, especially in the southwestern US, where black tar heroin comes from Mexico, and is distributed throughout the southwest, south and even to the northwest. Further towards the midwest, and on the east coast, the dope is primarily a light tan/almost white colored powder, that largely comes in from the middle east (and is erroneously referred to as China White by many people used to the Mexican black tar).

Without getting into the neurobiology of addiction, or debating really any aspect of it, as a recovered heroin addict of many years, hearing this song brought tears to my eyes tonight, because I totally understand what it's like to have my heart ripped out, feel totally alone with this enormous pain, and as if I were unable to breathe without it, the only thing that made me feel like I could get out of bed and get on with my life, was "black".

Amy was SUCH a talent, and ahead of her time... almost seems misplaced in history, and certainly cut down too soon. If you or anyone you know is suffering from heroin addiction or addiction to pain killers, there are some treatment facilities that actually address the physiological reason behind the addiction, and fix your brain chemistry. I'm not trying to turn this explanation into an advertisement, but just search for Desert Healing Center, in Desert Hot Springs, CA. They're saving lives with the work that they're doing there... restoring hope to people who, like me, had given up. I could have easily been where Amy is right now, if not for this place, and being super committed (and able) to find a solution. I wish we could have saved her, and I hope that this post is able to at least save SOMEBODY else.

But, as for the meaning of the song, it's definitely about heroin. "Blow" is cocaine and "Puff" is another dope reference... and, Black is most definitely directly about heroin. Clever of her to write the song the way she did, because if it had been more overt, it probably would not have received nearly as much public acceptance when it came out. May her voice live on forever!

How anyone could mistake the "black" in this song for anything other than black tar heroin is beyond me. Maye if you have never heard of black tar heroin, you might mistake it for something else - but Amy was definitely into heroin and other opiates and other drugs as well. Does anybody not know that? Her drug use, as blatant, unhidden, and over-the-top as it was, was actually a part of her cache as an artist and a big part of her personal identity. She emphasized it with her clothes, makeup, hair, body, etc. She never tried to cover it up or "maintain" - if she was f****d-up, she acted like she was f****d-up, and admitted being f****d-up, too. It is, at least, an honest approach, but I am not saying it is a healthy one. But maybe it is more healthy than the many drug-dependent, alcoholic or drug-abusing musical artists who publicly deny drug or alcohol use, while their lives slowly - or quickly - unravel. How many tragic downfalls there have been, so many deaths, so many lost careers, families, reputations and fortunes? This could literally be a party game - how many drug or alcohol related deaths in rock & roll or popular music artists can you name? I mean, where do you even start: Hank Williams? Janis Joplin? Jimi Hendrix? Jim Morrison? You get my drift.

Many of Amy Winehouse's songs contain overt drug references, although it can be missed sometimes here in the us because some of her slang may be unfamiliar to Americans, because she is - I mean, was - from the uk, and they use some different, often very funny, and colorful, terms for various stuff. Her music also deals quite bluntly with themes of sexual obsession, co-dependency, loneliness, emotional starvation, infidelity, betrayal, selfishness, interpersonal conflict, and all else that make relationships bad. She never sidesteps the difficult issues. I think it is one of the many things that make her music so compelling, so different and yet so easy to identify with - if not the exact circumstances, then the feelings behind them, at least. And then there's her amazing, versatile, unusual voice - her distinctive sound, and her masterful phrasing - she was very young, but she had what old pro's like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joe Cocker, Tom Waits, Peggy Lee, and a few others had. They, and she, had that certain something that takes a melody, a lyric, a way of turning a phrase or of breathing a word and suspending it in air, and makes it theirs, and somehow, for the first time, it's dead-on, like nobody else ever sang it right before, and in that vocal styling is imbued all kinds of meaning that somehow never seemed to come across before, when someone else sang it, even if they sang it perfectly well.
The great ones can take a song, or a fragment thereof, and what they do with it, and what they give back, to us, the audience, a bunch of strangers, is something intimate and touching, meaningful and personal, and it provokes within a kind of feeling, something that is deep and which comes welling up from somewhere just south of the heart, that we cannot help but sense, and respond to, involuntarily, at a physical, visceral and emotional level, and it happens even when the listener is not aware of what's being said. I mean, you could be from Japan, or Java, or Uzbekistan, and be able to read, speak & understand only Japanese, Javanese, or Uzbek - or Uzbekese? - or whatever! - but if you heard Amy Winehouse, (or any of the other artists I just mentioned as a few examples), sing, it wouldn't matter if you didn't understand the lyrics or know what the words were or what they meant - you would still be moved, you would still feel things, and it would be real. That's a gift and a rare one, to cause people to feel things deeply.

I believe Amy will go down in history as one of the truly great ones. Yes, it is very sad her artistic career, not to mention her one and only precious life, was cut short, and so tragically. Think of all the stuff we will never hear that she could have done. And that's just the selfishness of a listener speaking - think of all she could have done, and felt, and loved? She certainly had the talent, and a rare gift for what she did for us. And we, the listeners, are better for having had the privilege of being present for it.

In a 2007 BBC Documentary, Amy-Winehouse-revealed her agony relationship with Blake-Fielder-Civil, and was quoted as saying: "I fell bang in love with someone and it didn't do me any favors. When I split up with this fella, I didn't have anything to go back to. I wasn't working, so I was playing pool for four hours every day, getting drunk, having to be carried home in a wheelbarrow.So 'Back To Black' is about a black mood, I guess..He was the inspiration." Recently, Harry Fielder-Civil, Blake's brother said, They seemed hell-bent on destroying each other and didn’t care about dragging others down with them. It was like watching two speeding trains hurtle towards each other before a violent crash.”

The heart, it seems, only knows what it wants, and Amy's heart wanted an out of work video assistant with a history of criminal behavior, heroin usage, and female abuse. In a move that wasn't the brightest thing she ever did, she married the bum, and not long afterward the pair were photographed bloodied and bruised in the streets of London after a fight. The divorced by mutual agreement, according to Amy's father, and he, in fact, was serving a 32 month jail stint for burglary and possession of an imitation firearm at the time of Amy's death.

It is true, Amy Winehouse had been introduced to heroin by the love of her life who said they only smoked it, but in the end it was alcohol binge drinking that took her down. With her concert calendar empty and cancelled due to drunken and lewd behavior on stage, it appeared to her family she spent the last night of her life with a big bottle of vodka watching YouTube videos of her past performances. Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning on 23 July 2011 at age 27. She was an immense talent.

After her death, her family established the 'Amy Winehouse Foundation' whose main goal is to prevent the effects of drug and alcohol misuse by young people, and it to support, inform and inspire vulnerable and disadvantaged young people to reach their full potential.