“Valerie” by Amy Winehouse

by Will

I had to dig through some archives at AOL today and stumbled on this clip of Amy Winehouse singing “Valerie” at AOL. It is, technically speaking, Amy Winehouse’ U.S. debut — last January 2007. She was performing a concert somewhere in NYC and stopped at AOL for an interview and to record some songs. I was told “Someone named Amy Winehouse is recording some tracks here; we might as well videotape it. Grab a camera, set it to auto-everything and get it.” I was also told “She’s supposed to be a handful so get ready.”

But in the audio engineer’s office, she walked in and was as sweet as pie. She might even have been nervous since when she introduced her songs she had a slight stammer. But when she started singing — she was confident and great! I was nervous to even zoom in for fear of breaking the spell. It’s amazing how casual this all was — that’s her coat resting on the arm of her chair because she had just walked in and plopped down behind the mike. In two months I was hearing her songs in every Starbucks and whenever I was on hold — but this is my favorite version of her singing. Sara did a great interview with her right after. The other tracks are on YouTube here. The audio tracks are here on AOL’s The Interface.