The best songwriting comes straight from the heart, or, in the case of Amy Winehouse writing her hit song, “Rehab,” straight from a conversation she had with producer Mark Ronson while shopping for a birthday present in New York City’s SoHo district. After releasing “Rehab” on her second and final album, Back to Black, the catchy hook and 1960s soul vibe quickly cemented the track as one of Winehouse’s signature songs.
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The Grammy Award-winning hit single was a true testament to the power of catching lightning in a bottle. If Winehouse and Ronson’s conversation had naturally diverted to a different subject that fateful day in the city, there’s a chance “Rehab” would have never existed at all.
The Word-For-Word Conversation Amy Winehouse Turned Into “Rehab”
After their mutual publishing company encouraged the two to meet, Amy Winehouse and producer Mark Ronson met in New York City in 2005 to begin writing the songs for Winehouse’s sophomore follow-up to her 2002 debut, Frank. The pair decided to take a walk around the SoHo neighborhood where Ronson had a private studio. Not only did the outing allow Winehouse and Ronson to acclimate to one another, but Winehouse was also looking to pick up a birthday present for her then-boyfriend. While shopping, Winehouse began talking about a particularly low point in her life.
“We were catching up, getting to know each other, and she was like, ‘You know, I used to be kind of f***ed up,’” Ronson recalled during a 2019 appearance on The Howard Stern Show. “‘There was a time when I was drinking a lot, and my family and my manager and all these people came over to my house, and they tried to make me go to rehab. And I was like, ‘Pfft, no, no, no.’’ [She did] the ‘talk to the hand’ gesture. Because she was talking about it [as] a removed thing, and she was in such a good state when I met her, I was just like, ‘Oh, this is a funny anecdote.’”
Ronson said that although he “hated writing songs around a gimmick,” there was something catchy about Winehouse’s rhythmic delivery of her response to her family and friends. He asked Winehouse if she would be willing to go back to the studio to work their conversation into a song. Winehouse went off to write privately for about 30 minutes before returning to Ronson with a song.
Turning A Sultry Blues Ballad Into A Top 40 Pop Hit
Mark Ronson said that when Amy Winehouse first came back into the studio with the music and lyrics to what would become “Rehab,” it was a slow, swinging blues number. While that type of raspy swing would certainly suit Winehouse’s vocal style perfectly, Ronson was in the business of making Top 40 hits. Knowing that Winehouse was a big fan of 1960s girl groups like the Shangri-Las, he asked the singer if they could speed up the song to imitate the rhythm of “Leader of the Pack.” “She had the whole song on the guitar,” Ronson recalled. “All I had to do was come up with a nice beat for it.”
Winehouse and Ronson’s impromptu writing session would pay off exponentially. The year after its release, “Rehab” won three Grammy Awards for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, Record of the Year, and Song of the Year. “Rehab” became one of Winehouse’s signature songs until her tragic death from an alcohol overdose in 2011. Although her passing certainly cast a darker shadow over the track, “Rehab” still stands as a shining example of Winehouse’s ability to craft songs that harkened back to 1960s pop and Motown music while still being unequivocally her own.
Photo by John Shearer/WireImage
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