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The raw pain and sorrow of Back To Black, the title track of Amy Winehouse's second and final album, has given the song an enduring legacy among fans. In Soul Music, people who loved Amy Winehouse and her music talk about how she helped them cope with their own struggles.

Here, writer Daisy Buchanan tells her story of addictive love and how Back To Black helped her break free.

“He left no time to regret”. Most music fans can identify Back To Black, the titular single from Amy Winehouse’s 2006 album, from the moment they hear the first line. Musically, it references the soul music of the sixties, and the work of girl groups like The Ronettes and The Shangri-las. Producer Mark Ronson used the "Wall of Sound" production formula, pioneered by Phil Spector – so even though the song is just over a decade old, it plays a trick on the listener, suggesting itself as a song they have known for all of their lives. Critics and fans have made many suggestions about what the meaning of the song might be. Over the course of her life, Winehouse, who died at the age of 27, had a private life that attracted as much attention as her work. Her drug addiction, alcoholism and painful romantic relationships were documented extensively by the tabloid press.

Daisy Buchanan

It鈥檚 the track that allowed me to make sense of my own doomed, difficult feelings.

Back To Black is a song about vulnerability and pain. We know that Winehouse wove her life experiences directly into her songs. However, by sharing her darkest and most tender moments, she created a piece of music that transcended its own autobiographical meaning. Winehouse’s fans have listened to the song and found elements of their own life reflected back at them. This makes the song a perfect subject for Soul Music – it’s a piece of work with a universal emotional impact, and a unique meaning for thousands of listeners.

For me, Back To Black isn’t simply a great piece of music. It’s the track that allowed me to make sense of my own doomed, difficult feelings when I found myself in love with a person who didn’t love me back. I felt hurt and furious because my emotions seemed completely illogical. My friends and family gave me plenty of well-meant advice, but it all came back to the same unhelpful idea. My feelings were wrong. I was too emotionally messy, and until I tidied myself up, I would be beyond help. When Winehouse (Amy, in my head, always Amy) sang “and my tears dry, get on without my guy” with a slight sneer in her voice, seeming to mock herself, almost laughing at the idea that she might be ready to move on, I felt as though I had found the only person in the world who understood what I was going through.

The American novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison also found comfort and personal meaning in Back To Black. On Soul Music, she reveals that Winehouse’s words and voice allowed her to begin to come to terms with her own alcoholism. “It was less that I felt that I understood her and more that I felt she understood something about me, and drinking became a way to seek relief from that self-imposed sense of always needing to be good enough otherwise I was going to end up alone,” she explains. “That feeling that you are alone even when you’re in the company of others was also something that Amy Winehouse had a way of speaking to, that kind of vulnerability and precision that resonated really deeply with me and resonated with a lot of people, that truth, that kind of deep human truth…even inside a life that looks pretty good from the outside, you can just feel impossibly alone.”

For the musician Umaru Saidu, the song provided a space to experience feelings of grief and bereavement. “She’s created a legacy where she’s helped me go through my things, massively. In 2017 my childhood best friend who I looked up to quite a lot passed away very suddenly. Just to go through that was very, very hard. In relation to Back To Black, in the darkest moment, in that blackness, you’re kind of left on your own. The pain, for me, of not really getting to say goodbye… for me it’s very painful but I think I’ve kind of gained some perspective on the good times and what that meant and what he taught me, the power of his voice… even though he’s not here.” Saidu is a graduate of the Amy’s Yard programme, an initiative supported by the Amy Winehouse Foundation for vulnerable young people who wish to become musicians.

Amy performing in 2007

Back To Black is a Millennial I Will Survive.

The author and blogger Elizabeth Kesses told Soul Music that the song took on a special resonance for her when she met Winehouse at the London Clinic, where she and Kesses’ father were patients. (Kesses’ father was suffering from terminal cancer.) “I saw someone who was incredibly lively and vibrant, and having heard her songs and heard how dark some of her moments had been I found it strange to think that this person in front of me, so full of life, was so tormented by demons. It kind of got me thinking about myself because I really lacked self esteem when I was younger and it took me a long time to build it up.” Kesses explains that after her father died, she went into therapy – and her interaction with Winehouse inspired her to seek positivity and make a life-affirming decision. “It led me down a new path of being and living… I wish Amy had had that chance herself, because I think she had so much to give, she was such a creative soul, and yet she wasn’t supported in the way perhaps I was by a partner and helping counsellors.” Kesses says that for her, Back To Black has taken on a bittersweet meaning. “When I hear this song now I think it’s a mixture of sadness and joy. A celebration of Amy and a celebration of myself, because through her darkness she was able to create. There is sadness because she didn’t make it. I think it’s wonderful that we can carry on and celebrate this song today.”

Jamison has also found a new, positive meaning in the song after making changes in her own life. She explains that listening recently “felt like an acknowledgement of the fact that the world holds all of it, all the time, that the world holds innocence and sadness, the world holds joy and unrepairable pain, and those two live alongside each other.” On Soul Music, I describe Back To Black as “a Millennial I Will Survive”. It’s a hymn to vulnerability, and a song of despair – but even though Winehouse died tragically and too soon, many of her fans see Back To Black as a song of survival. For us, it provided a guiding light during a dark and difficult time. We can’t pretend that we really understand what Winehouse was going through, and yet she created a piece of music that made us feel seen and understood.