To Speak 'Frank'ly on Amy Winehouse's Debut Album

By Lexie Dykes

“Take your time and slowly, but quickly, get out,” demands the emcee in the spoken word ‘Outro’[1] on Amy Winehouse’s 2003 debut album Frank. We’ve overstayed our welcome. We’ve read too much of her diary. If she could have had it her way, this platinum-selling, Mercury-Prize nominated and BRIT award double-nominated diary would be scribbled out, ripped to shreds or burnt.

“I’ve never heard the album from start to finish. I don’t have it in my house,” she told Garry Mulholland at The Guardian[2] . Disappointed and disillusioned by the lack of creative freedom during a messy recording and production process, her feelings towards many involved are best told in her own typically direct words: “I hate them fuckers, man”. But the album still entered the UK album chart at 60 before climbing to its highest position at 13. Signed to Island Records and under Simon Fuller (creator of the Spice Girls and management company 19), dissing her debut was the response of a woman who knows things now at twenty. Only three years later she would release the only other album before her death: her Magnum Opus Back to Black[3] , which is one of the best-selling and most critically acclaimed British albums of all time with its darker poetics and Hitsville-style soul sound. But fundamental to getting there was Frank, as was Winehouse looking back in anger and cringing at its reminders of loss of music-industry innocence and of 19-year-old girlhood.

Frank is a highly personal “bildungsralbum”, 16 tracks that embody coming-of-age contradictions between wit and clumsiness, confidence and vulnerability, innocence and insight. Winehouse directly expresses, layers or subverts musical and lyrical ideas to suspend her tracks between teenage freedom, naivety and imprudence, and adult experience, wisdom and revelation. The subject matter, like most from her tragically small oeuvre, pivots on the singer’s romantic, familial and musical relationships. She tackles these subjects with both frustration and tenderness, which still rings soulful and charming 22 years after its release. A number of tracks reveal problems with her older then-boyfriend of 25, Chris Taylor, and her discussions of sexuality and taboos are approached with refreshing honesty. The album was a courageous, sentimental, and at times aggressive first stab by a young female artist singing about love.

Frank’s romance comes in Amy’s cover of 1936 Jazz standard ‘(There is) No Greater Love.’[4] Her heroes were Jazz vocalist legends. Growing up in Southgate, north London to a taxi-driver father and pharmacist mother, she trained at the Sylvia Young Theatre School, sang for the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, performed standards in London clubs, and developed her practice at the BRIT school before a schoolmate sent in the demo that got her signed by 2002. Members of her family were professional Jazz musicians, and her grandmother had a romantic past with saxophonist and club legend Ronnie Scott. She grew up listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Sinatra – the album’s eponymous nod. Immediately, Frank, from its title alone and its ‘Intro’[5] with Billie Holiday-style scatting over a walking bass, is in debt to the sound world of her youth. ‘October Song’[6] evokes Kurt Weill’s ‘September Song’[7] , and ‘She’s reborn, like Sarah Vaughan’, samples the melody from Vaughan’s 1952 ‘Lullaby of Birdland’[8] . Amy’s ‘(There is) No Greater Love’ is in the style of Holiday’s 1958 version: soft and slow, it’s set to an intimate, sultry, muted backing of nostalgic crackly vinyl, night-time crickets and swelling saxophone, piano and flute. However, she’s not blindly copying. She makes percussive use of her voice and varies dynamics to share a moment of rapture uniquely. This tender atmosphere also found in ‘I Heard Love is Blind’[9] lends the album its classic feel. She takes off our rose-coloured glasses whenever she subverts these sweet moments of conventional crooning: “The only time I hold your hand / Is to get the angle right” and “Take a token / Of my love” - a pun on the word ‘toke’ in the final track ‘Mr Magic (Through The Smoke)’[10] turns it into a look at her relationship with cannabis. She can shape cruder, more striking and more honest contemporary realities of all her relationships.

‘(There is) No Greater Love’ ends with a beginning. The saxophone’s final phrase is the opening phrase of 1954 Jazz standard ‘Misty’[11] . This leads into the contrastingly forceful drama ‘In My Bed’[12] , ironically all about stale sexual relations with an ex. Playing with beginnings and endings through Frank’s poetics and form, she can reflect on experiences, locate her feelings in the track’s present moment, and look ahead to the next song and its new encounters. ‘In My Bed’ is the most contemporary and urban piece, co-written and produced by Salaam Remi, producer for RnB and Hip-hop acts like The Fugees and Alicia Keys. It’s an effective change of pace, shifting the energy away from Frank’s traditional Jazz influence via looping Nas’ 2002 ‘Made You Look’[13] , and revealing Winehouse’s ability to blend genres with coherence. The Hip-hop sample is textured by layering bluesy synth chords, wind-section instrumental breaks and a saxophone countermelody to her brassy vocals in the outro.

It's this knack for making Jazz sound cool but unusually “young” and unstuffy, and Hip-hop gritty but maybe unexpectedly polished and “grown-up”, which gives Frank its importantly experimental feel. She was exploring and exalting her varied musical interests. “Amy was a contradiction in many ways, very old and very young at the same time,” proclaimed Charles Moriarty[14] , the photographer responsible for Frank’s cover image of Amy walking a terrier across London at night. Flirting with styles gives Frank a confidently sexy sound, as if years of experience with men precede her. “I’ve forgotten all of young love’s joy” she declares in the Ivor-Novello award winning opening track ‘Stronger Than Me’[15] . Has she forgotten the joy of early days with Chris Taylor or the joy of all the loves of her youth? Her poetic insight lies in this kind of ambiguity between innocence and experience. ‘Stronger Than Me’ dominates with angst towards her partner’s passivity and inability to satisfy her childish needs: “that’s what I need you to do, stroke my hair”. Frequent questions patronize him as much as her naïve and homophobic lyrics, problematic but nonetheless a realistic kind of early 2000s British playground insult: “are you gay?”. Her unapologetic, brash tone lets her state demands and highlight responsibilities maturely in later tracks ‘Brother’[16] and ‘Help Yourself’[17] . In the first track she’s just trying to stay in control.

“Put it in the box, put it in the box” she convinces herself in the Erykah Badu-style ‘Take the Box’[18] . This chorus’ vocal echo, similar to the “tut-tut-tut” of ‘Amy, Amy, Amy’ places demands on herself as much as her subjects. ‘Amy Amy Amy’[19] , about an all-consuming romantic prospect, is set against hypnotic perfect 4th interval loops which “spins a spell” on the listener as strongly as the teacher does on the student Amy. She’s clearly not afraid of laying bare controversial encounters and states sexual fantasies throughout the album: “I just wanna grip your body over mine”. Frank displays her capacity for introspection, which is both mature but true to that teenage condition. But Frank isn’t apologetic. Winehouse knows her ‘destructive side has grown a mile wide’ and she’s not afraid to question herself: “Where’s my moral parallel?” Contemplating her father’s extra-marital affairs in ‘What Is It About Men?’[20] , she bluntly declares her “Freudian fate” to become a homewrecking mistress. This vulnerable confession reveals her trauma, her destructive temperament and her poor judgement, providing the album with a darker energy that’s impossible to not hear as prophetic of what’s to come musically and personally: “Rehab”[21] .

Douglas Wolk suggested in his 2007 Pitchfork review [22] upon the album’s U.S. release that we are complicit in Winehouse’s bad decisions by listening to her songs. He’s totally right, because she lets us know her musical and personal stakes are intertwined: “It takes me half an hour to write a verse...Creative energy abused / And all my lyrics go unused”. Wolk asked, “What are we as her audience supposed to do? Stage an intervention?”. Maybe we should have. Her writing feels genuinely authentic, whatever that slippery word means, but at what cost? “Creative energy abused” may explain the album’s inclusion of a second standard rather than more original writing. Her version[23] of James Moody’s 1956 ‘Moody’s Mood For Love’[24] was not included in the U.S. release and is deemed irrelevant by some critics. But Winehouse’s scatty and syllabic vocals on this reggae track show her ability to deftly navigate a high-tempo, unpredictable melody filled with awkward intervals. If anything on Frank need affirm the supreme talent of a budding vocal artist with a high degree of versatility, control and range, this track does.

Her melismatic, drawling technique permeates ‘You Sent Me Flying’[25] , a vivid picture of her fragility and dejection after being taken advantage of. It’s like she’s wailing the lyrics “You sent me flying when you kicked me to the curb”; one need only hear the virtuosic, word-painting run on ‘flying’ and the ad-lib “k”s before ‘kicked’ to realise how expressive her voice is. ‘Take the Box’, the highest charting UK single from the album, has a similar vulnerability. If her musical heroes mean everything to her, letting her Sinatra record go (“Frank’s in there, I don’t care”) with other items to accept the end of a relationship is a vast display of courage. But she revels in her discomfort and confusion: “Mister-false pretense, you don’t make sense / I just don’t know you / But you make me cry, where’s my kiss goodbye? / I think I love you”. She riddles her bridge with attraction and repulsion, confidence and confusion through witty internal rhyme. The short ‘Cherry’ [26] is a patronizing piece with a perfectly satirical light-hearted Bossa groove. She demeans her partner for not satisfying her like Cherry can, revealed to be her guitar in a final twist. Dehumanizing him and personifying her guitar, suggesting “Maybe we could talk ‘bout things / If you was made of wood and strings,” is a wonderfully ironic way to muse on the pathetic level to which their communication has stooped, set to apt descending chromatic scales. We can’t help but feel her bold and quirky character radiate through cheeky and wry lyricism.

And if her personality radiates in ‘Cherry’ it fully shines in ‘Fuck Me Pumps’[27] , a satirical character study of promiscuous women in a bar-setting. The instrumentation is mockingly simple, a repeated arpeggio motif under its lyrics : “Don’t be too upset if they call you a sket / Cuz like the news, every day, you get pressed”. She’s on the attack, and innuendos, slang, and puns are her weapons. She’s clearly looking for a fight and it’s her at her most arrogant and rebellious. Salaam Remi, speaking to Zane Lowe and Mark Ronson (British producing legend and collaborator on Back to Black) in an interview[28] with Apple Music in 2022, said being with Amy was “almost like we have a bad kid and the kid does something and you’re trying not to laugh because if you laugh the kid’s gonna keep going”. With such clever insults, you can’t help but enjoy her ridicule these women. You can’t help but find this teenager funny.

‘I Heard Love Is Blind’ is on the defensive. It’s intimate with an acoustic soundscape that is strangely hazy for this brutal confession of her infidelity. She sings in triplets over the steady 4/4 accompaniment, providing a rhythmic awkwardness like that of her futile plea to her partner for forgiveness. Syncopation and swing can be found in pretty much every track, displaying heavy Blues influence. Punchy syncopated brass accents throughout ‘In My Bed’ make lyrics and accompaniment “like two ships passing in the night”. ‘October Song’ is another site of female agency. Winehouse eulogises her dead canary Ava, granting her soul rebirth. The various relationships explored in Frank, between her and her pet, her drugs, her brother or her records, ensure she’s not defined solely in relation to the reappearing subject of her romantic partner.

Her most mature and confident track is ‘Help Yourself’. Hopeful and positive, the twelfth track has moved beyond the frustrated bitterness of ‘Stronger Than Me’ and the fragility of ‘You Sent Me Flying’ to land in a place of peace and strength. The repeated “I can’t help you, if you don’t help yourself” becomes a self-assured mantra, an affirmation set against the tinny, jazzy major chord progression sampled from Doris Day’s 1945 track, suitably titled ‘You Won’t Be Satisfied’[29] . This atmosphere of carefree abandon is flooded with revelation: “it’s where you’re at, not where you’ve been”. If age is just a number to Amy then she knows it definitely is regarding immaturity. She sees it all through the smoke. She knows what’s up. Frank reveals her knowledge of relationships being journeys of self-discovery, change and enlightenment. But she knows she doesn’t know it all. The album’s final lyric dissolves ‘Like Smoke’[30] into the saxophone solo; she’s ultimately still “waiting for the smoke to clear”.

Frank can be devoured today by listeners of artists like Laufey or Raye. The two sang ‘It Could Happen To You’[31] at Lollapalooza only last year. Both artists are also shifting canonical vocal Jazz works into the charts: Laufey’s via a grounding in Classical music and shaping a “clean girl aesthetic” for preppy, pump-wearing female listeners. Raye infuses her Jazz with Blues and Hip-hop to write confessional songs about sex and social media, indulging in a contrasting “messy girl aesthetic”. Her 2023 My 21st Century Symphony (Live at the Royal Albert Hall) is thematically similar to Frank. Employing thick orchestral textures, layered vocals and heavy brass, her instrumentation is very like that of Winehouse’s live posthumous compilation At the BBC.[32]

There’s something appealing about Frank to our pop-cultural moment. “Underwear peeks out the top” is Brat[33] 21 years before Charli XCX will try and make sleaze cool again. Frank is “do it for the plot”. Frank is “for the girlies”. Frank is the “what’s on my bedside table” trend’s images of chaotic clutter-core rooms. ‘In My Bed’ might as well have been Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’[34] , exhibited at the Tate only four years before the album’s release. Frank is likewise witty and honest assemblage, a broad collage of musical influences and life experiences.

Winehouse looking back on Frank from a distance and with irritation only proved that her debut was the important site for growth, both as an artist and a woman. Maybe she wished she called it Billie or Sarah instead, for Frank’s observations of relationships and sexcapades engage with a longstanding feminized musical tradition of employing both satire and subversion, and sincerity to express personal content as Frankly as possible.

(Bibliography, Works Cited/Further Reading type stuff links)

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/808-amy-winehouse-kurt-cobain-and-the-gendering-of-martyrdom/

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/revisiting-amy-winehouses-stunning-debut-album-frank/

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10032-back-to-black/

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2003/oct/17/jazz.shopping1

https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/frank-amy-winehouse-album/

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16112-lioness-hidden-treasures/ https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/amy-winehouse-problem-with-frank/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESaQGIsjJKk

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2004/feb/01/popandrock.amywinehouse

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/sep/13/best-album-21st-century-amy-winehouse-back-to-black

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWtZUujPRmQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZDwsy-a2F4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh1KywlmyPo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2LX5EiQSyk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8cFdZyWOOs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XxATv3PL0I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-EREgsX6B0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJXLqAutql4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdi_yuSgQw8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhPtRA7zieE

https://crackmagazine.net/article/long-reads/amy-winehouse-frank-artwork/#:~:text=Under%20Covers%3A%20The%20untold%20story%20behind%20Amy%20Winehouse's%20vivacious%20Frank%20artwork&text=Under%20Covers%20is%20a%20new,classic%20and%20groundbreaking%20album%20artworks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CYE0DYIbaw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVl5FjsCnbo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhrI8ES-rZI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoZIde3vFwI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa25_1obwWM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suLAnOYA44A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUmZp8pR1uc

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10900-frank/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzafg6sAi4M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZktI44n4DE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1vwoIE1HkY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVaqQe3V498