Amy Winehouse’s favourite lyric of all time
In her seminal hit ‘Rebab’, Amy Winehouse declared: “There’s nothing you can teach me that I can’t learn from Mr. Hathaway”. Donny Hathway was a guiding force for her, a deeply romantic songwriter dogged by a similar story of mental illness throughout his career. Winehouse’s equally pained words on love were shaped by Hathaway’s, whom she often covered and constantly praised.
“I’m only flesh and blood, but I can be anything that you demand,” a lyric from Hathaway’s 1973 track ‘I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know’ was Winehouse’s favourite lyric and one she used in the 2008 HMV Inspirations Gallery, citing it as the one that she consistently returned to when writing. Its confessional tone has all the lovelorn agony of ‘Love Is A Losing Game’, and Hathaway’s self-sacrificing tact is one well-established in most of her discography.
In one interview recorded before her death, Winehouse lamented the current state of songwriting, saying too much of it was about spiteful independence: “You don’t know me, I don’t need you,” but she always preferred the old romantic stylings of soul and ’60s girl groups. “All the music then was like, ‘I don’t care if you don’t love me – I will lie down in the road, pull my heart out and show it to you.'”
When she covered ‘A Song For You’, she drew entirely from Hathaway’s 1971 version rather than Leon Russell’s. In the session notes for the posthumous compilation album it appeared on, Lioness: Hidden Treasures, producer Salaam Remi recalled her schooling everyone in the studio on Hathaway’s influence. Recorded at her house, Remi caught her singing after briefing checking the tabs on a computer.
“It wasn’t even like a proper studio mic,” he recalled. “She just had a mic near her and started singing, and I caught some of it from the drums being mic’d across the room. For this album, I really pulled it together, not to clink, not to a beat; she was just singing at home barefoot. She really emotionally took on the lyrics and started weeping while she was doing it.”
Remi said she wept because she felt the song so deeply. “She felt like Donny Hathaway spoke to her,” he said. “It was a moment for me to watch, and at the time, I wish I had video cameras in my eyes, but also it was actually something that she really felt. She mentioned him in ‘Rehab’, and she sings a lot of his songs live. That song actually has all the emotion she could pour out, but also all the chord changes that she did and the way she sang it towards him.”
Amy introduced scores of young audiences to Hathaway’s material and an alternative way of writing love songs. She could do the feisty, scorned woman lyrics that were popular at the time, which ‘Stronger Than Me’ and ‘Fuck Me Pumps’ are enduring proof of. But she was far more at home charting heartbreak in such a painful way that it evoked the ’70s masters of doing the same, with Hathway as her eternal teacher.
