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After four years of meltdowns, collapses, trysts, addiction and recovery, Amy Winehouse has promised that her next album will be out by January. Although it's not clear whether she has actually started recording the record, the singer has predicted something "very much the same" as 2006's Back to Black.
"The album will be six months at the most," Winehouse told Metro. She was speaking at the premiere of the film Psychosis, directed by Reg Traviss – allegedly Winehouse's new boyfriend. "It's going to be very much the same as my second album, where there's a lot of jukebox stuff and songs that are – just jukebox, really."
Unless "jukebox" is obscure slang – or a new dubstep sub-genre – we can assume this means an encore of Back to Black's neo-retro production, with dusty horns and burnished backing singers. However, this sound's key architect, producer Mark Ronson, said last week that he has yet to start recording the album. "Amy hasn't begun working on her next record yet," he told journalists after a gig at the 100 Club. "When she's got 10 songs we'll go down to the studio together."
Winehouse had been a surprise guest at the Ronson concert, singing the lead on Valerie, from his Versions album. But the performance was rocky, as Winehouse appeared to forget the song's lyrics. "I was probably a bit out of sync," the singer later admitted. She claims she had forgotten which version of Valerie they were playing – "the one that came out like the Supremes", or the unreleased version that she claims to perform with her band. "It was really fun to be onstage with him, though."
After the million-selling, multiple Grammy-winning Back to Black, expectations for Winehouse's next album are high. As early as 2008, an exec at Universal Records was calling her new material "exceptional", and in October 2009, the co-president of Island Records said he had been "floored" by demos. The album, he said, would "hopefully" be out in 2010. But so far the recording seems to have been a series of stops and starts. Despite starting three tracks for a tribute to Quincy Jones, and even a James Bond theme, none of these came to fruition. She was also reported to be working with Salaam Remi, who co-produced Back to Black, in St Lucia and later Jamaica; not to mention her father's now-disputed claim that she recorded three tracks with Ronson in the spring.
Still, Winehouse has not been completely idle. She started a record label to release her goddaughter's debut. She got married – and divorced. And according to ?uestlove, of the Roots, there is talk of a supergroup featuring himself, Winehouse and rapper Mos Def. It's "jazzy", he told Rolling Stone. Or perhaps just jukebox.
