Mitch Winehouse Talks About Amy’s Foundation

I have already posted this on your site, but I am hoping that the Winehouse family will have a chance to read it. I was very happy today to see that Amy’s mother was wearing Amy’s Star of David. I tried to contact the foundation but the link awf.contact@gmail does not work.

AMY: Iconoclastic Titanic
Amy was like the Titanic, grandiose in style, beauty, and one of a kind. But she was on a steady course to hit her iceberg and sink to the bottom. We all hoped she wouldn’t hit that iceberg, but knew in our hearts that “over futile odds,” sooner, more than later it was inevitable that if she stayed on her “troubled track” that she would crash and take everything magical about her down with her. It is strange, now that she is gone, I cannot ever imagine her a day older than her short life of twenty-seven.
I am fifty-five, a mother; I’ve been through three divorces, countless boyfriends and lovers and I’m not necessarily proud of the countless part. When Amy died, a place in my soul was punched as if a family member had died and “I died a hundred times.” I had a tremendous broken heart. All of Amy’s songs sang my life. I wonder if within her youth and soulful wisdom, she had any idea of how broad her audience was; if she knew of how her songs spoke and connected retrospect to the seasoned lives of older women, our emotional upheavals, our desperate loves. F-Me Pumps, Take The Box, You Sent Me Flying, Back to Black—-been there, done that.
Drugs were more than abundant in South Florida when I was her age and I drugged and drank too many times and would often just wake up in the morning in my car in some parking lot. In my twenties I would do ANYTHING for Cocaine, and I know how the Cocaine devil can speak to you and demand to be fed, and that was just Cocaine; Crack and Ecstasy was not around then. I cannot imagine what I would have become with an endless supply of money to buy all the drugs I wanted.
When I bought “Back to Black” I listened to it for three months straight. The words were “brutally honest, seizing my gut” and captured the truths that made me “so ****ing angry” about so many of my failed relationships and infidelities. Then when I bought Frank, the same thing; I couldn’t stop listening, hearing her breathing life into the words of the songs she sang that were the legacy of my life. She took words and manipulated them into magical transportations of time, scratching deep reverberations down into my soul, getting under my skin; causing me sometimes not to want to think of the heartfelt mistakes I made and the loss of self-esteem that I lost by my “crying on the kitchen floor.” I was patiently waiting for her next album, addicted by the need to soothe my heart and conscience but not knowing how to put it into words: I wanted more Amy. AMY WAS MY DRUG.
Since her death I bought some Amy tee-shirts which I have worn and received an amazing amount of comments about her untimely death. But, the biggest surprise is the amount of comments from women my age. These women speak to me, echoing the sentiments of what a loss she was and how she sang their lives, too.
After seeing her horrendous concert in Serbia, where she was hugging herself and looked so lost and sad, I suspect she just couldn’t go on with the demands of fame, the disappointments to herself and others, and the unrelenting hatefulness of the paparazzi. Recently, there was a picture in a magazine of Amy and Tony Bennett promoting their duet, but the caption read something like “I left my drugs in San Francisco.” The press would never miss if they could take a shot at her addiction—at her disease. I think she just didn’t want to sing anymore; it wasn’t fun and she was tired of being a machine that had to keep churning out the same thing over and over again. The drinking and the drugs softened the hard edges of the music business she found herself in. I think sometimes she just wanted to lie down and die.
Amy said, “I didn’t think it was special to be able to sing.” She didn’t just sing; she had an irrefutable, individual genius talent. She had just the right amount of ability to take her voice and lyrics deep into a twisted splintering groove in our brain and soul. Her voice was both a place filled with power and with pain. She demanded, ripped, and lacerated our hearts and would then turn around and make us amused. She was extraordinary in every sense of the word. For Amy: Your memories mar my mind and this ache in my heart will take a lifetime for my tears to dry on their own.
SL Kandy, Miami, FL sleeptightamywinehouse@yahoo.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwK6byC-gAs&feature=channel_video_title