Amy answered the wake up call. Everyone loved her (my) idea and Ronson got right on it. Sharon Jones was gracious as I predicted. The Dap-Kings got sucked into the burgeoning vision and they in turn showed Amy how to lead a band. The whole team immediately started making perfect music together.

It was obvious to all that the maelstrom of lust and addiction that Amy compulsively contrived for herself was but a creative crucible. It had all become songs...being no good, going to rehab (or not, as the case may be)...with smoldering videos of her just totally owning a character that was literally designed to enflame me in the most unclean ways. As a connoisseur of femme fatales, I can easily say there have been few vamps as awesome and awful as my babyslut was then! I wisely stayed on the sidelines through most of it, but sometimes she would steal away to play me the mixes and beat herself up on my cock, lounging around in my bed absently fondling herself while I listened to hit after hit.

As I gazed upon her filthy beauty, I didn't know whether I wanted to rape her or snuggle her. Pride, pity, lust and anger wrestled in my heart. I was her daddy and I was her fan. I know protecting her from herself would be futile, regardless of how much I might have wanted to, but, god help me, sometimes I didn't want to.

The new album was a tour de force. A few wags suggested early on that maybe the whole bad girl thing was a put-on, given how sublimely realized it all was, but the public knew better as Amy ratcheted up the tabloid scandals and the emotional drama. I even let her marry one of the pathetic creatures she shared drugs with, making sure the nuptials took place in sunny Miami so she could face the justice of the peace with some of my warm semen still running down her slutty legs. Part of her honeymoon was spent wasted by my pool. It was madness, but I was bewitched.

One night I was far away from her, in more ways than one, sitting in a Seminole gaming hall, drunk on rum, watching a lounge singer and her pianist play an old standard for probably the millionth time. Yet the woman could not let the words pass through her mouth without being effected, such was the emotional investment compelled by the song. That's what makes a classic.

Amy had made such a song. She had written a future standard, that a hundred years from now would catch in some singer's throat and choke her up just like I was seeing some old song do to some old broad right then. I knew it would have that effect because Amy's song had been choking me up for weeks. It was the kind of song that Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday would have sung and meant and understood, the kind of song that old guys like me listen to those old records for, a song that assures us that the game can't be won, and thus we are all noble losers, and with a tip of the glass and a sorrowful grin we know we will gamble again, despite the futile odds. Melancholy hope, it was nothing but the blues. To come from a 23 year old British white girl was preternatural, transcendent, inexplicable. In Jamaica they say "who feel it, know it" and this was so fucking real it felt like she was singing a swan song, and I didn't want it to be. I wanted to hear it like the music I was hearing at that moment, a song to be sung forever, a song that lounge singers sing when they want to be serious, a song for Amy to sing in her old age.

So I dialed London and told her. I held the phone up to the stage, entreating sloppily. "I've listened to the album version a thousand times, babyslut, a million times, but this is how I want to hear it now, just like this here, just like all the great songs end up getting played, with some old guy unseen in the dark, comping on a cheap keyboard, not indifferent as much as tired, perhaps playing a little too busy, maybe a little quick, but you slow it down, babyslut, not because you want him to play at your tempo but because you are in your own little world, with no reverb on the mic, almost claustrophobic, not singing the song as much as the song is singing you, and I want you to choke on it for a second, to be overcome not by your own profundity but by the love and sadness this song makes me feel for you. Will you do it like that for me, babyslut, will you please?"

I hung up before I even heard her answer, and probably would have forgotten the whole embarrassing conversation if I hadn't seen this video a few weeks later.

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