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Member Since: 2/19/2003
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08.
Amy Winehouse - Tears Dry on Their Own
Average Rate: 8.891
Highest Score: 10 (15x)
Lowest Score: 7 (1x)
UK Chart Peak: #16
US Chart Peak: N/A
Tears Dry on Their Own, written solely by Amy, was the fourth single off of Back to Black. An alternate version can be heard here, but the version that made the album sampled "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," written by Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson and performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.
Quote:
Originally posted by Amy Winehouse
'Tears Dry On Their Own' is a track about the break-up with Blake, my ex. Most of these songs are about him. I shouldn't have been in a relationship with him because he was already involved with someone else a bit too close to home. The song is about when we split up and saying to myself: 'Yes, you're sad but you'll get over it.' And I did.
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In the summer of 2007, in the midst of Amy's ... troubles, the video was shot in Los Angeles by David LaChappelle.
From The Singles Jukebox:
Quote:
Originally posted by Brad Shoup
In these last days, audiences understand singles varnished with the sampled past. For those paying close attention or reading their online encyclopedias, “Tears Dry on Their Own” attempts a magic trick: to escape from the shackles of an ever-enduring Motown hit. Not just to escape the history of a carefully-deployed and -shaped sample, mind, but an interpolation of the entirety of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” (Briefly noted: the cleverness of negating texts.) Nearly every instrumental detail in “Tears” comes transferred, with varying altitude, from the Ashford-and Simpson-penned standard: James Jamerson’s bassline is augmented with low-end brass, woodwinds are boosted, the snare attacks with the force new technology affords, etc. These are the shackles, the water cell that Winehouse and producer Salaam Remi provide themselves. The trick is only completed as Winehouse supplants Marvin and Tammi’s fervent strain with a measured self-interrogation.
As ever, she has that distinctive voice, not wielding “pipes” so much as a sure hand on the turnwheel: fearlessly ending lines with the drawl of her natural pronunciation, but occasionally tossing off references to the usual swing ‘n’ torch vocal luminaries, as well as Lauryn Hill (cf. “**** myself in the head over stupid men”). All the while she’s favoring texture over classic vibrato. Her jazz phrasing isn’t the invention of sad people making true-music heroes out of cheery dabblers; she’s all over the beat, pushing here, falling back there, befitting the song’s numerous lyrical switchbacks and mental castigation. Correctly viewed as one of the cleverest songwriters of the decade, Winehouse lays off the double-entendres here in favor of a couple vignettes and a strident refrain that tries to push the verses’ mental swirl and Sisyphean bass progression to some sort of conclusion. But that’s how change tends to work: the drastic event can’t be willed; there’s first a series of choices and abdications that can take all life long. The day comes, the tears dry: something is suddenly not like it was just the hour before.
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