Amy Winehouse

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Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse "Lioness: Hidden Treasures" album

- Release date : December 2011 -

Lioness: Hidden Treasures is the first posthumous compilation album by English recording artist Amy Winehouse, released on December 2, 2011 by Island Records. The album features unreleased songs and demos picked by Mark Ronson, Salaam Remi and Winehouse's family, including the first single, "Body and Soul", with Tony Bennett. The album was released in aid of the Amy Winehouse Foundation.

Lioness: Hidden Treasures was announced for release on 31 October 2011 via The Sun and Winehouse's official website. Island Records co-president Ted Cockle has emphasised that Lioness is not in any way the planned follow-up to 2006's Back to Black album. In fact, only two songs intended for the planned follow-up had been completed prior to her death. The album is a compilation of recordings from before the release of Winehouses's debut album, Frank in 2002, up to music she was working on in 2011.

Producers Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson collaborated, compiling the album with the consent of the Winehouse family. They worked together on listening back to thousands of hours of vocals by Winehouse. Remi commented on the project, "When I listened back you would hear some of the conversations in between — that was emotional. It has been hard, but it has also been an amazing thing. Amy was a gifted girl. I believe she has left something beyond her years. She has put a body of work together that will inspire an unborn generation. I'm blessed to be part of that process, to have known that person and to continue her legacy with this album. Remi told NME that the album would not lead to "a Tupac situation", referring to Tupac Shakur, in whose name seven posthumous studio albums have been released since his death in 1996. He stated, "A lot of people, through the other antics that were going on with her personally, didn’t get that she was at the top of what she did. Coming to Miami was her escape from all of that, and her writing process could document her life, whether it was recording the pain or the loneliness or the humour. It makes no sense for these songs to be sitting on a hard drive, withering away."

"Lioness: Hidden Treasures" album tracks and lyrics

"Lioness: Hidden Treasures" album reviews

''Like smoke, I stick around,'' Winehouse purrs on Lioness: Hidden Treasures. It's a strange thing to hear the late songstress promise: Sticking around was never really her thing. For her, anything not meant to last — the golden years of Motown, doomed romance — was always worth loving more fiercely. So it's bittersweet that this not-totally-essential set of covers and rarities refuses to let her leave us for good. True, as posthumous albums go, it's leagues beyond hastily assembled fare like Michael Jackson's Immortal. That's a credit to producers Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson, who also helmed her 2006 classic Back to Black. Wisely sticking to early versions of girl-group gems (Ruby & the Romantics' ''Our Day Will Come''), outtakes (2002's ?uestlove-aided ''Halftime''), and alternate versions of singles, the album largely sidesteps the dozen or so post-Black recordings that Winehouse made while battling her addictions. (Lioness includes just two original tracks.) Hearing the clear-eyed, full-voiced Winehouse of 2004's ''Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow'' give way to the scorched rasp of 2008's ''Between the Cheats'' is heartbreaking. It's only on Leon Russell's ''A Song for You'' that it's clear she had anything left to give after Black. Recorded at home in the spring of 2009, it reveals the singer at her most raw: ''When my life is over/Remember when we were together/And I was singing this song for you,'' she cries, her voice growing quieter and quieter. Like smoke, she was fading away before she was gone. B

*** by Melissa Maerz, Entertainment Weekly ***

There's a moment right at the end of Lioness, the final album from Amy Winehouse, when she shows a faint glimmer of self-awareness which, sadly, arrived too late to save her from the course her demons had chosen.

She had just been wrestling with "A Song For You", the Leon Russell standard made famous by Donny Hathaway, the troubled soft-soul star who committed suicide in 1979. According to producer Salaam Remi, who subsequently added organ, harp and strings to the recording, Winehouse was teaching herself the song, reading the lyrics and guitar tablature from a computer screen as she sang. In all honesty, it's a bit of a dog's breakfast, unanchored in tempo, momentum and pitch, but when it finishes, she says: "Y'know what? Marvin Gaye's great, but Donny Hathaway, like, he couldn't contain himself. He had something in him, y'know?"

The unspoken subtext being that she, too, had something she couldn't contain, something that drove her creativity but which was also her Achilles' heel. For a moment here, she seems to realise the bind she's caught in, but these are the last words of the album, too late for her to act upon.

While Lioness is a far better posthumous collection than Michael Jackson's Michael, from almost exactly a year ago, it's a poor substitute for the high-octane musicality of Frank and Back To Black, created as it is from covers, outtakes, demos and the few new tracks Remi could scrape together, lent a modicum of homogeneity by smooth string and wind arrangements and the sometimes brutish imposition of terse hip-hop drums. They range from a chipper version of "Girl From Ipanema" drenched in Winehouse's scat-singing, to a promising demo of a new song, "Like Smoke", on which rapper Nas's tribute to her serves as a meagre substitute for Winehouse's own voice, largely restricted to wordless"dee-dah-dah" outlines for putative vocal melodies. But the hook is like an arrow to the heart: "Like smoke, I hang around".

Winehouse's own material is rather more revealing of the emotional turmoil in which she appears to have spent much of her time: "This deep regret I have to get accustomed to", as she puts it in "Tears Dry".

The best track on the album, partly because it is also the most sparse, is "Wake Up Alone", a lovelorn reverie set to brushed snare, rimshot and acoustic guitar, with the singer dreamily reflecting: "I stay up, playing out/Least I'm not drinking/Want a rub, just so I don't have to think about thinking." But then she wakes up alone again, the subtlest touches of horns on the fade-out accompanying her voice as it recedes into the cavernous, echoing distance, a ghost of desire floating out of reach.

*** by Adam Sherwin, The Independent UK ***

It says something about the lowly reputation of the posthumous album that Amy Winehouse's Lioness: Hidden Treasures comes accompanied by an apologetic-sounding assurance. "This isn't a Tupac situation," offered one of its compilers, producer Salaam Remi, by which he presumably means this is the first and last time Winehouse's stash of unreleased material is going to be raided, in contrast to the mind-boggling 25 albums released in the 15 years since the rapper rattled his clack.

On the evidence of Lioness: Hidden Treasures, it doesn't sound as if they've got much choice. The compilers have clearly had to pull every trick in the posthumous album book in order to cobble together 45 minutes of music. There are early recordings that would probably never have seen the light of day had the artist lived. For someone who was seemingly cursed with fatally lousy judgment in most areas of her life, Winehouse was remarkably prudent when it came to the matter of releasing records: you could never have accused her of wilfully saturating the market with product, which does make you wonder what she would have made of the wider world being exposed to a ho-hum version of The Girl from Ipanema. There are big-name special guests drafted in to bolster unfinished songs. Questlove of the Roots – a man fearless enough to consider forming a band with Winehouse a year before her death – plays on the beautiful 2003 out-take, Halftime. Nas adds a rap to Like Smoke, a track from her unfinished third album: "You know how me and Amy, we're straight playas," he offers, a funny thing to say about a woman famed for being publicly heartbroken, and who drank herself to death at 27. And it concludes with the unmistakable, weirdly unsettling sound of a lo-fi demo vocal that's had an entire song constructed around it.

Nevertheless, Lioness: Hidden Treasures still tells you a lot about Amy Winehouse, albeit sometimes unwittingly. The shift in her vocals from the careful enunciation of her early material to the smeared, ragged voice on her later recordings is pretty striking. At least part of that change must have been down to what the accompanying blurb tactfully refers to as Winehouse's demons, but it also speaks volumes about her confidence as a singer: she's gone from sounding eager to please to sounding like a woman who only cares about pleasing herself.

So does comparing a cover of the Shirelles' Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? from 2004 with a demo of Valerie from two years later. It's interesting to hear producer Mark Ronson feeling his way towards what would become his signature sound on the former, but Winehouse doesn't really inhabit the song. By contrast, the Valerie is taken at a speed closer to the Zutons' original than the hit version, but the lubricious crackle in Winehouse performance is already there. She makes the innocuous line about missing your ginger hair sound almost indescribably filthy, turning something that started life as a song about a lovelorn boy dreamily wondering what happened to his ex on its head.

But it also tells you something about the way Winehouse's life unraveled. The vast majority of the album dates from 2002 to 2004: not a problem when the material is as good as Halftime or her reggae cover of Our Day Will Come, but it serves to underline how little she did, or was able to do, after Back to Black's release. Much trumpeted a couple of years ago, the sessions for her projected third album yield only two songs: the troubled doo-wop of Between the Cheats ("I'd take a thousand thumps for my love," she drawls) and Like Smoke, which sounds as if it would have been incredible were it finished, but consists of little more than a chorus and some scat singing. She appears to have recorded almost nothing in the last two years of her life, bar her duet with Tony Bennett on Body and Soul and a cover of Leon Russell's A Song for You, recorded in her attic in 2009: Remi reported the singer accompanied herself on guitar, then broke down in tears, apparently finding the lyrics too apposite. The latter could be the best thing here. Or at least it could have been, had Remi felt emboldened to just present the original rough recording, instead of trying to turn it into a polished finished product: a process which, as anyone who's heard the Beatles' Free As a Bird will tell you, never quite works. Presumably it was felt that was what was wanted by the audience Lioness: Hidden Treasures is expected to attract: not the kind of diehard fans who normally flock to posthumous collections of out-takes and demos, but mainstream record buyers, Radio 2 listeners, the Christmas market. Which, of course, tells you something else about Amy Winehouse.

*** by Alexis Petridis, The Guardian UK ***