Edition №17
Back to Black is the record that introduced me to Amy Winehouse when it was released. Not long after, I was working as Director of International Production at MTV, and I was hearing more chatter about the turmoil in her personal life than about the music.
In my first year in that role I went to the MTV Europe Music Awards in Munich, on November 1, 2007, to survey the production, because parts of it would be under my management the following year. Amy was on the bill, and I'd been looking forward to finally seeing her perform. I had all-access credentials, so I was able to stand very close to her satellite stage. As soon as the lights came up I could tell she was in rough shape: thin, fragile and dazed. She sang "Back to Black" beautifully, and she wasn't there. The audience roared.
Her songs inspired and helped me through different points in my life, and I still listen to them, on 2 copies: the 2006 European CD and an American LP reissue. I keep both because they don't end on the same song. The CD closes on "Addicted," and the LP closes on a second "You Know I'm No Good," this one with a verse from Ghostface Killah.
The swap follows the line between the album's 2 producers. Mark Ronson produced 6 of its 11 songs, which began as rhythm tracks the Dap-Kings played live to analog tape at Daptone in Brooklyn and were finished in Pro Tools. Salaam Remi built the other 5 digitally in Miami, and the European CD's rear insert credits them to him by track number. "Addicted" is the last of Remi's 5, so on my shelf the CD carries all of his songs and the LP carries 4.
Which copy you buy decides how much of each producer you get. Both of this edition's picks, on vinyl and on CD, carry the 11 songs as they were released in October 2006, opening on Ronson's "Rehab" and closing on Remi's "Addicted."
The 20th-anniversary editions arrived on October 23. The 3LP's first disc is a new cut of those same 11 songs, and its third is a live set recorded at the Paradiso in Amsterdam on February 8, 2007, nine months before Munich. I haven't decided whether to buy it; it depends on the analysis. Discogs credits the new cut's mastering to Miles Showell and Alex Gordon at Abbey Road, and nothing I've found says what it was cut from.
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Reference Checks is a Twelve Bar Studio production. If you've ever bought a record everyone praised and wondered why yours didn't sound like the one they meant, that's the problem I started it to solve. My listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and kept out of every verdict. Research uses AI tooling; the verification and the editorial are mine. See Editorial process.