An Unreleased Amy Winehouse Demo Has Surfaced And It’ll Make You Cry

Back in 2001, Amy Winehouse was just a 17-year-old London singer desperately trying to get signed to a record label.

She linked up with London songwriters Gil Cang and James McMillen, in an attempt to craft a song that she could take to label meetings. The three of them eventually came up with a track called ‘My Own Way’, which they then recorded at a studio in Camden.

For whatever reason the track was never officially released, and it sat with Cang for 17 years until he decided to share it with the public this week.

Cang uploaded ‘My Own Way’ to YouTube three days ago, after stumbling upon it last week: “I’ve had it knocking about for so long. I found it again last week and thought ‘I’ll put it out there so people could hear it’,” he told Camden New Journal.

“We’d been writing quite a lot of pop tunes, doing a lot of pop promos with various artists who would come in, many of various, dubious talent,” Cang said of writing with Winehouse. “It was at a particularly dire time in the pop world — lots of terrible, terrible girl bands and boy bands and we had to make something for them. Amy came in to see us, opened her mouth and just blew us all away.

“We were struck immediately by her talent – it was a real jaw on the floor moment. We were like wow, yes.”

The demo is made even more remarkable due to the fact that all other Winehouse demos were destroyed by her record label following her death in 2011, in order to prevent any posthumous albums being released. A lone collection of b-sides and covers — Lioness: Hidden Treasures — was released in December 2011.

“It was a moral thing,” Universal Music UK CEO David Joseph told Britain’s The Guardian in 2015. “Taking a stem or a vocal is not something that would ever happen on my watch. It now can’t happen on anyone else’s.”

So there’s a fair chance that ‘My Own Way’ will be the last Winehouse original we ever hear. Listen to it below.