Bibek Acharya
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who wasn’t instantly stunned the second Amy Winehouse ever opened her mouth to sing. Her voice transplanted from a whole other era, oozing with a 1960s soul swagger that proved to be a tonic to the swathes of monotonous 2000s pop. That golden touch was reflected in the many classic musicians who clamoured to be in her orbit – but more than just her sonics, her lyrics also stood as perfect ruminations on love, loss, and life.
Releasing only two albums in her all-too-short musical tenure, Winehouse truly had an unmatched talent for striking the heart of pain in her lyricism, and none more so than in her song ‘Love is a Losing Game’, which came out in 2006. In a concise but all-too-destructive manner, Winehouse addressed the notion surrounding the breakdown of love in a way that is simple but resoundingly universal.
Throughout the song, referring to her lover as a “gambling man” and their relationship as a “losing hand”, there’s a sense of resignation which ebbs from every word – regret and melancholy at “love is a fate resigned,” as she now looks down the barrel of the “final frame”. It’s consigning to the fact that things are really, truly over.
But then, amid the litany of lyrical daggers, Winehouse dropped the ultimate bomb of misery when she sang that her relationship was coming to an end “over futile odds/ And laughed at by the Gods”. It constitutes perhaps her most heartbreakingly real lyric as it questions the point of ever loving in the first place if stark pain like this is to be endured as the consequence, bringing a swell of emotion and fresh questions to the surface.
Zooming out to watch the grand scale of the world, Winehouse implies that her specific pain and love at large mean very little to the workings of the universe. There’s the remotest possible chance of romance ever blossoming, let alone sustaining, and now that it’s over, it just seems to be the natural consequence of the world. The words are true simply because they imply that although heartbreak is desperate, ultimately, sometimes there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.
Subsequently, as the song closes out on that devastating final blow, there isn’t left to do apart from let the sadness of the moment wash over you until it invariably moves on again to its next unsuspecting victim. Winehouse, in all her relatively tender years, clearly possessed a wizened old soul in order to realise this, and more than the physical parameters of the song itself, what makes ‘Love is a Losing Game’ the most heartbreaking is that this profundity has been lost to the world forever.
Of course, there are many blindsiding moments like this in the Winehouse songbook, but arguably none come as close as ‘Love is a Losing Game’ in channelling that resigned sadness cultivated out of only the deepest depths of pain. It takes a pretty seismic level of force to pull it off vocally, but the moment in which she first put the pen to the page deserves just as much recognition.
