Producer Salaam Remi Remembers Amy Winehouse on the Anniversary of Her Death
The producer of Nas’ “Cherry Wine,” which features the late singer in one of her last recordings, says “I’m shocked that it’s already a year … I just miss her.”
One year ago today, producer Salaam Remi was heading to Amy Winehouse’s London home when he heard of her sudden death.
In town to attend the wedding of Winehouse’s former manager Nick Shymansky, Remi tells The Hollywood Reporter, “I was on my way over, I was picking up some food in Shepherd’s Bush … and by the time I got there, there was press and people everywhere.”
Like many of Winehouse’s friends, family and fans, her sudden death was a shock to Remi, who had worked with the songstress since her 2003 debut album, Frank. Fortunately, her legacy lives on with posthumous releases including, most recently, “Cherry Wine,” a collaboration with Nas off the Queens rapper’s Life is Good album released last week.
In it, Winehouse pines for that evasive one true love, while Nas elaborates through the verses with lines like, “I want someone who like the champagne I like. My a-alike. Someone to talk me off the bridge any day or night.”
Remi, who produced this track, as well as much of the new Nas album, explained it had been a song he and Winehouse had been working with since the two began working together. They had toyed with varying arrangements, including this one that was meant for her third album, which was never recorded.
“It was all very fluid,” Remi recalled of this recording with Winehouse. “I had the drums up, was playing guitar and she’s singing, it was just another day in the office for us. We’d done different versions of it over the last couple years when we kind of messed around with it, playing with it in different types of arrangements, but this version was always what felt right at the heart of our original inception.”
Quoting Winehouse’s lyrics from the song, Remi continued, “‘Where is he? The man who was just like me? I heard he was hiding somewhere I can’t see.’ I don’t know. It was natural. It’s the talent that Amy had flowing out of her.”
Fans will note, “Cherry Wine” is the second posthumous collaboration between Winehouse and Nas, the first of which being “Like Smoke” from the late-2011 album, Lioness: Hidden Treasures. Remi said both songs’ Nas verses were recorded over the same period of time in October, “but everyone felt that ‘Smoke’ should be on Lioness and this was more suited for Nas, so that’s what happened.”
“It was just clockwork,” he continued. “I was in London or Miami at the time, [Nas] wrote it and sent it back. But he understood it, just from getting at that chemistry… He could just listen to it and fall right into it in a way how that he explained the scenario totally matched what she was saying. It was chemistry, it all fell together, and it’s a stand apart song. I’m a big believer in not tagging records by saying what it’s supposed to be, but letting it be what it is and letting that magic happen because that’s the magic that we can’t explain.”
Remi, a multi-Grammy-nominated producer and songwriter, will be among this year’s recipients of the Amy Winehouse Foundation Inspiration Awards held in October. With her from the beginning to end, he was the last producer to work with Winehouse and recalls introducing her and Nas.
“When I’d just met Amy, I was doing ‘Made You Look’ for Nas’ God’s Son album at the time,” Remi said. “And I was just starting to work on Amy’s Frank album, so there are Nas songs where Amy did ad libs on them that we never put out that were just background that she was just singing on. She was really inspired by him… Over the last couple years a lot of times if I had my computer on in the studio, my Skype would ring and Amy would be there, ‘Hey what’s up?’ And then she’d end up talking to Nas or whatever, then they got each other numbers and they would talk.”
When asked if there was any romance between the two, Remi said absolutely not.
“Over this last year of looking at Amy Winehouse and what’s going on there, what I felt was that it wasn’t even songs that she left behind. She left behind inspiration,” Remi said. "She will inspire another generation and another set of people. She might have collectively 20 or 30 songs that she’s released for her actual recording career but I feel that she inspired many other artists to now dig back into her artistry. She was inspired by Ms. Dynamite, by Ella Fitzgerald, by Donna Washington, by Lauren Hill, all these other things and people that she’d never met, and mashed it to make who she was. So now she will continue in that same idea of inspiring other people.
“I miss her. At the end of the day that’s what it really comes down to. I’m shocked that it’s already a year. I can also look back and say it was a long year since then. I just miss her. As far as her as a person, she just always had something smart to say. And you’d want to be like, ‘You shouldn’t have said that.’ But then you’ve got to laugh because it was so funny. I miss her actually as a person. And musically, she still stands up there as one of the best to ever do what she’s done.”
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/earshot/amy-winehouse-death-nas-salaam-remi-cherry-wine-353034
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Salaam Remi On Making Reggae With Amy Winehouse
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the death of one of the modern era’s greatest recording artists, Amy Winehouse. As we pointed out in the story we published two days later, “Amy In The Sun,” beyond the vintage soul and jazz she was known for, Amy was also greatly inspired by reggae and Caribbean culture in general, an influence that manifested in a number of great but often overlooked records. As it happens, we just sat down with Salaam Remi, the producer behind many of those records and Amy’s closest musical collaborator, at his Miami studio just the other day (Look out for our full feature on Salaam coming soon). Naturally, Amy came up and, in light of today’s anniversary, we thought it was only appropriate to share that part of the interview here.
On Amy’s Artistry:
“With artists, you just have to inspire them. If you give them something to inspire them, then they give you back something that you could not have asked for that’s bigger than anything you can dream of. That’s how that works. With Amy, I was just able to say stuff to her that made her think she could write what she wanted.”
On Amy’s Love for Caribbean Culture, and the Reggae Recordings Salaam Produced For Her:
On her first album I introduced her to “Moody’s Mood for Love,” which was a jazz record I knew because Frankie Crocker on WBLS would close every show with it. She learned it in a couple days and I was like you know what, let’s do a reggae version just to have a different swing of it. So that became the reggae version on that album. Then “Just Friends,” was really a jazz type song when we originally did and she said let’s make this the reggae song, like we did with the other one. So I flipped the arrangement, and we had that on the second album. And of course she had other songs that she was starting to record where we would flip reggae versions. We just knew we could do that with songs, like turn it on it’s head, let’s just do it that way with the same music. With the musicians we were working with, it was just easy. I’d change the bassline and flip the drums around and next thing you know it starts feeling like the reggae version. And that’s just something that she liked. She was into that type of music. She was into West Indian culture in general. All of her security were Jamaicans. Most of the people she had around her had some type of core West Indian element to it.
She was comfortable with it. When we were in St. Lucia she was writing but relaxing, not being in the cold anymore with Paparazzi chasing her around—they had to stay far in the bushes out there—and figure out what was next.
On Reports That Amy Recorded An Unreleased Caribbean-inspired LP in St. Lucia:
We were there recording and stuff but there was never an album done like that. That was just people talking. Of course we had versions of other songs and we would flip reggae versions. We just knew we could do that. There’s a couple things but none of them are finished. There’s not a reggae album coming out. I could make one but it’s not like it would be recorded to make a reggae album. That wasn’t done.
On Amy’s Posthumous Single “Our Day Will Come”:
“Our Day Will Come” wasn’t recorded as a reggae record, originally. I just thought about what she was singing. We actually did two versions, one with the reggae. And when her family heard that they were like, “That sounds like Amy.” They just felt her spirit was in the room when they listened to that. That’s why that was the single for that album, and it starts the album. Because they just felt, wow, this feels like her.
