There are several ways one might construct a soundtrack for AMY, the compassionate and horrifying Amy Winehouse documentary chronicling her brief, doomed arc through superstardom. The obvious choice would be to make the soundtrack 100% Amy, whether through covers (the tactic of the soundtrack for the Nina Simone documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?) or through Winehouse's own voice. But in the AMY: The Original Soundtrack, Amy Winehouse is actually outnumbered: her 11 B-sides are broken up evenly by 11 snippets of film score, with the balance tipped by one exceedingly unnecessary trip-hop track, originally released in 1995.
This is not for lack of material. Winehouse began her public singing career at age 16 with the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, performing and recording regularly for the next decade until her death. She's already had one posthumous compilation album (2011's poorly named, respectability-minded Lioness: Hidden Treasures), but if the tracks available on YouTube are any indication—let alone the unreleased professional recordings that her still-active fanbase lists and obsesses over on message boards—there are plenty of demos, live versions, and discarded mixes left. AMY: The Original Soundtrack, however, contains only one true "new" recording. "We're Still Friends", performed live at the Union Chapel in 2006, shows Winehouse on the cusp between her peak and downfall; the recording is precise and elegant, and she wears her strung-out voice like a crown.
The rest of the soundtrack is a mix of album cuts and live recordings, compiled primarily as signposts for the documentary's plot. There is no raw audio on the soundtrack whatsoever; it's much glossier than the film itself, which heavily relies on rough footage and successfully illuminates Winehouse outside her press narrative as a result. In AMY, it's arresting to watch her so unguarded, putting her makeup on in a bar bathroom before a gig, giving a tour of her apartment in character as a haughty maid. Her talent flames into incandescence and out of it; her flesh shrinks into bone. She's frequently captured singing in the film, from "Happy Birthday" at a friend's house to that gruesome final show in Belgrade, where she was essentially walking dead. The collage is forceful, and in context you barely notice that the film is scored at all.
The soundtrack, then, serves as your reminder. Antonio Pinto, who wrote the music for both City of God and City of Men, even has the opening track. It's a minimal, mournful minute of piano. "This is sad, remember," the song says. "What's about to happen is very, very solemn." But could there be anything that requires saying less?
Presumably, the instrumental interludes are meant to give her tragic arc some breathing room, like asterisks that break up a story. But one of the best things about the AMY documentary is that its pacing feels so natural—invisibly punishing, just like life. The effect of this soundtrack is exactly the opposite. The power of her voice is undercut by the regular intrusion of the film score, which doesn't reference her musically in palette or instrumentation. As a result, the album feels like a powerful hand clasping a limp one. Winehouse had an essential personal relentlessness, which her audience reflected back at her, and the soundtrack to a movie that climaxes at her death has no right to hide or diminish that.
Everyone already knew that Winehouse was a genius vocalist. To its credit, this collection highlights her sardonic writing, choosing songs where she translated her life cuttingly, always with a twist. She was happy to project her true self outward just enough to disguise it as a persona; she was stuck on the same themes of self-aggrandizement and self-diminishment, and she was almost supernaturally ahead of the story. As her pianist says in the documentary, she "needed music like a person, and would die for it"—and she was ready to, and did. "Rehab" was a distraction by way of being right on the nose; her many admissions ("It's not just my pride, it's just 'til these tears have dried") made us complicit. Back to Black uses depression as a euphemism for heroin in the title. Even "Tears Dry on Their Own", her black-swan sequel to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", contains a withdrawal metaphor.
The latter is reproduced in its original album version on AMY, which is fine, because what does a rarity mean in the age of YouTube, anyway? What could be new, in this context, when the star in question was hounded to death by demons so public we all saw her crack pipe and paparazzi so relentless that they slept outside her house? This soundtrack album doesn't even seem aware of those questions, and like any album bearing Amy Winehouse's name from 2011 onwards, it's a diminishment—this time severe.
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