Amy Winehouse’s Third Album Demos Destroyed By Her Label

Christina Lee | July 1, 2015 8:03 am
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Billboard reports in its latest cover story how Amy Winehouse had started her third album and booked studio time with producers Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson before her tragic death in 2011. While these demos could have easily made for a posthumous release, Universal Music UK decided instead to destroy them.

“It was a moral thing,” says David Joseph, Universal Music UK chairman and CEO. “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.”

Joseph’s decision is an interesting one. This month’s release of the tell-all documentary Amy, of which Joseph is an executive producer, would have surely helped build interest for a posthumous album. Still, as he seems to have realized, to release Winehouse’s demos would be to have someone else work on music that she never intended to be heard.

“L.A. gave me a call and said I was the perfect person, and in the beginning I was like, ‘Yeah!’” Timbaland once said about working on Michael Jackson‘s Xscape. “But, you’re working on someone who’s not here, so it was kinda difficult for me. I felt I couldn’t touch it right away. I thought I could, but I couldn’t.”

[via The Guardian]

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