Amy Winehouse: Back to Black Meaning
Song Released: 2007
Covered By: Glee Cast
Back to Black Lyrics
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet
Me and my head high
And my tears dry
Get on without my guy
You went back to what you knew
So far removed from all that we went through
And I tread a troubled...
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1TOP RATED
#1 top rated interpretation:To me the way I take this song is: She is in love with a guy who is unsure of the love she holds for him, so in turn he doesnt want to take a chance with her out of fear that he doesnt know if she will stick by him, so he always goes back to the other woman he knows no matter what he does to her she will always be there. Its a re-occuring theme throughout the enitre CD like when she says "thought I didnt love you when I did" in "Me and Mr.Jones". Going "back to black" is going back to the emptiness she feels without him, going back to drinking and darker times. Which again is another re-occuring example in the song Rehab she says "Im guna, Im guna lose my baby, so I always keep a bottle near"."He left no time to regret" she is the one he was cheating on his woman with, so she had no time to regret what she had done. In "Tears dry on their own" she says "Even if I stop wanting you, a perspective pushes through Ill be some next man's other woman soon". When she says "Kept his dick wet, with his same old safe bet" is literally what it means he put his ------ in the other woman's ------- because what does a girl say she is when she is horny?? "With his same old safe bet" is the other girl that again no matter what he does to her, she will be there because she keeps letting him come back, therefore she is a "safe bet" where Amy is someone he is unsure about if she will do the same. "Me and my head high, and my tears dry, get on without my guy" to me she is meaning that she is trying to act like its not effecting her, so she can seem proud when in reality she is hurting because she is "without my guy". When she says "You love blow, and I love puff", early on in her career all she really did was smoke weed and drink. She stated in an interview that the record company kept hassling her to start on her 2nd cd she said she smoked a ton of weed and the lyrics started pouring out of her. Blake on the other hand was more into harder drugs and is the one that introduced her to them which he admitted to doing, so he loves cocaine, she loves weed. In the song "Unholy War" she says "When he waits for the blow" and she is talking about him fighting an unholy war in which I take it to mean him fighting his war against drugs. "You go back to her, I go back to us" He can go back to her but she has nothing to go back to but their relationship because for her there is no one else but him. If you take the whole album as a whole certain lyrics become easier to understand because throughout the entire album there are certain topics she keeps talking about. This is just the way I see it not saying Im right, Im just a huge fan of Amy, have been, and will always be.
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2TOP RATED
#2 top rated interpretation:Having been in an affair with a married person here's how i interpret these lyrics. Her lover has returned to an old flame or his wife, someone he is comfortable with but who doesn't provide the fireworks he has/had with the singer. More likely his wife since each time he goes back to her the singer "dies." Only said goodbye in words means the singer has not left him in her heart yet. Each time he goes back to the other, the singer goes back to being alone and having a hard time with that. She's traveling a lonely path full of dark feelings. Twenty years after my affair, these lyrics resonate like it all happened yesterday. Amy, you were an amazing singer and songwriter.
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3TOP RATED
#3 top rated interpretation:He left no time to regret
Kept his dick wet
With his same old safe bet
Me and my head high
And my tears dry
Get on without my guy
You went back to what you knew
So far removed from all that we went through
And I tread a troubled track
My odds are stacked
I'll go back to black
He left no time to regret simply means that the ex male lover has left no time for himself to feel bad about leaving the relationship. Instead, he returns quickly to a former lover. Hence the writer says, "kept his dick wet" moving from one woman to another woman/one sex partner to another.
The relationship he returns to is apparently a less dangerous one, hence the writer states, “Kept his dick wet with his same old safe bet...”
She proceeds to talk about herself as one who is not fazed by his leaving. She portrayed herself as confident in the fourth and six line when she said, “Me and my head high, and my tears dry, get on without my guy." However, it becomes clear in the last and penultimate lines of the first verse that that she is altogether disturbed that he left, “My odds are stacked
I'll go back to black” . The shade black represents sadness/gloom. Thus Amy is confessing that prior to their relationship , she was sad and now that he has left she is sad once more. -
This song is about a woman who has bouts of depression due to the presence and absence of the man in her life. The video depicts a funeral which in my eyes is Amy dying over and over again. The burial of the box at the end is Amy seeing herself; buried in sadness and yet again a bystander to her own personal Hell.
The repetition of the word "black," in the lyrics is almost visual in the sense of her falling into deep, deep, depressive darkness.
Amy knows her lover is untrue to her and ironically she is the one who SHOULD be unfaithful. But no. It is the one who has no fame being fickle and playing games. Amy is disappointed in her on again off again mate; as well she should be. He wastes her time and she remains on this Hellish emotional roller coaster. Life lesson:
When anyone rejects you...and I mean ANYONE; remain calm and sane, especially publicly, and live like they never existed. Don't mourn them like they've died. They will notice this twist of revelation and vie for your attention but your head is too high to see them and your eyes are in the skies.
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All interpretations here are wonderful. They interpret the song well. But in the video she is burying somebody. Who is that? I think the video does not fit to the song. The video is a different story, just about associations of the word "black", isn't it? An other interpretation of the video would be that she is burying her feelings of love for that man.
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If you google drug translations, pipe could be a vein, penny rolling up it, substance going up it,black = marijuana/opium/methamphetamine,blow=cocaine/to inhale cocaine/to smoke marijuana/to inject heroine,her= heroine,a puffer= crack smoker, devils dick= crack pipe.
A former drug taker told me that it was all about drugs and how she used drugs by a generally smoking and inhaling, and the chap she's singing to injected it a lot. -
Black could mean passed out. I find other peoples interpretations to be possible and interesting, perhaps I'm wrong in my assumption. Anyway it saddens me over her death.
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The entire album "Back to Black" is kind of a story, and taking that story into account, Back to Black is a pretty simple song. She fell hard for a man (Blake Fielder Civil) under bad circumstances (Tears Dry suggests she was the other woman from the start) and the love was a powerful mutual thing. Him going back to his girlfriend and ending the his illicit affair with Amy will send her back to a dark place.
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This interpretation has been marked as poor. view anyway
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The song is about a boyfriend/lover who is going back on heroin (blow). When he goes back to "her" she goes back to black (black tar).
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This is about her leech of a boyfriend who went back to his ex and got her pregnant while he was in jail because Amy, going through her own troubles stopped coming to see him in jail. He, the little sissy bitch that he is got pissed off thinking only about himself and not what Amy was going through with him in jail. She loved him for real to the end, and ended it because of not being with the one she loved. She didn't go back to drugs, she went back to drinking, and that is what she died from.
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Maybe it's just me but seriously, if u watch the music video it is a funeral so the "back to black" line means, perhaps going back to wearing black clothes for mourning a death, although no one has died its like her lover is dead to her noe that hes gone back to his old girlfriend. "back to" suggests that he's done it before but shes forgiven him. That was my interpretation that seemed obvious when I listened to it but the other ones are probably more accurate.
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He left her for his ex. He went back to her and she is left alone. The black is the dark, the silence, loneliness, trapped. So she was good with him that kept her alive. Now he left and now she's back to her addiction, the dark side, where she could express herself, back to her own spirit.
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Amy references being black or going black in more than one of her songs. Pretty sure it's a romantically lyrical way of saying blacking out or doing lots of drugs/booze.. The songs about her and her boyfriend being on drugs and basically how she's a standby woman to him. If you take the lyrics from rehab it makes way more sense "yes I've been black but when I come back you'll know."
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I think that the whole song is going back to the "dark times".
When something bad happens, a tragedy of sort, people accept it differently.
I honestly don't know and I suspect no one truly does what stands behind those lyrics.
We can only interpret it the way we see it and base our interpretation on generating possibilies about which part of her life it's about. -
I think it is about a lover leaving her, and more or less being so broken-hearted she can't love anymore. If you watch the video, it is a funeral, and at the end it says "RIP The Heart of Amy Winhouse"
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"Back to Black" is similar to the saying in films, "Fade to Black", or the end. Saying, "I died 100 times" is that slow/constant re-living of the ups/downs of the relationship ending up in the same spot. The pipe metaphor is she wanting to curl up in a dark place and burn up, her preferred choice of self destruction. The "goodbye with words" shows the breakup without emotion leaving everything unsettled. He gets over her with the "safe bet" and she fades to black.
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This interpretation has been marked as poor. view anyway
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