Amy Winehouse - Love is a Losing Game
She may not be doing any more concerts but Amy Winehouse still has an album to promote and what a promotion • this is the fifth single released from ‘Back to Black’, an album of just ten songs. But then, what an album, I can’t believe someone as genuine as Winehouse routinely attracts, almost deliberately, the publicity of someone who’s not.
Unlike some of the previous songs, ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ doesn’t name check Ray Charles, like ‘Rehab’, or sample ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ • the Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell duet and Motown’s greatest triumph, like ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’. It’s toned down.
This is the kind singing done on stage, sitting on a barstool, in a thin cloud of smoke with just a band who do little to interfere. Winehouse is young enough to be the daughter of the typical woman to sing this ballad; born well after the times and, for some of them, deaths of the people whose memory it resurrects but she makes it raw and improvised, like the inspiration for the song is next to her waiting for his turn to speak.