Post by valerie davenport on Oct 2, 2007 8:49:50 GMT -5
Annie Lennox has released a new album, “Songs of Mass Destruction,”
and is planning an American tour.
ANNIE LENNOX is a worrier. She worries about victims of war, about
African children with AIDS, about the poor and the homeless. She
worries about the state of popular music, about every detail of her
album packages and Web site, about her stamina as she gears up for an
American tour after her fourth solo album, “Songs of Mass
Destruction”
(Arista), is released on Tuesday. One thing she doesn’t have to worry
about is whether her songs move people. She can see that for herself.
It happened, for instance, while she was rehearsing with her band
just
over a week ago, at a former biscuit factory in the dreary Bermondsey
neighborhood of London. “Ah, this is the life of glamour,” she said
wryly, with her Scottish burr. In her do-gooder mode, Ms. Lennox was
about to headline a sold-out benefit concert at the Royal Albert Hall
for Peace One Day. It’s an organization that achieved a United
Nations
resolution making Sept. 21 an annual day of peace, and it is now
working to establish that day as a full-scale, worldwide cease-fire.
Other people would do the speechifying at the concert. “At the end of
the day, people just want to be entertained,” she said. So she was
rehearsing a mini-set that tucked her new single, the hymnlike ballad
“Dark Road,” between upbeat (but not necessarily cheerful) oldies
dating back to her solo debut album, “Diva,” and her 1980s albums
with
Eurythmics.
Midway through “There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart),”
which
may well be an elegy masquerading as a love song, one of her backup
singers suddenly heard the words anew and burst into tears. “The song
just opens up,” Ms. Lennox said afterward. “That’s what you’re aiming
for.”
Ms. Lennox, 52, has made a career of music that works at
cross-purposes. In Eurythmics, her duo with Dave Stewart, Ms.
Lennox’s
husky soul singing was the sensual, human element in grids of
synthetic sound. And on her solo albums, beginning with “Diva” in
1992, she has created elegant settings for ever more desolate
thoughts.
“She’s a very strong person and yet one of the most sensitive people
I
know,” said Glen Ballard, who produced the new album. “It’s hard to
keep your eyes open and see all around you the suffering and
unfairness of life. That sensitivity — all humans turn it off as a
practical matter to get through your life. We mask it off, wall it
off, sweep it under the rug. And I don’t think Annie ever does that.
She feels everything, and the only catharsis for her is the music.
With all of the stuff she feels, if she couldn’t express it through
her music she’d implode.”
Ms. Lennox has made just four solo albums in 15 years, and one of
them, “Medusa” in 1995, was a collection of other people’s songs. For
Ms. Lennox, writing is an essentially private experience, starting in
a room with a piano. “It’s hard work because you don’t know what
you’re writing about,” she said. “You’re just working on the hunch
that maybe it’s possible that some idea might fly into your head or
come out of your mouth, or the piano might have some beautiful chords
that you might respond to, that you could just catch long enough to
hold on to.”
Ms. Lennox recalled the writing of what may still be her best-known
song, Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” She had just had
a bitter fight with Mr. Stewart, who remained her musical
collaborator
after their romance ended in 1980. “I thought it was the end of the
road and that was that,” she said. “We were trying to write, and I
was
miserable. And he just went, well, ‘I’ll do this anyway.’ ” Mr.
Stewart came up with a beat, Ms. Lennox doodled the octave-hopping
synthesizer riff, and suddenly they realized they had something.
“I sometimes think the creative process is like this,” she said.
“Sometimes you get to a really bad place, like that, something
really,
really bad. And then it just goes, and oof — something comes. It’s
almost like the storm before the calm.”
Mike Stevens, her band’s music director and demo producer, said: “An
album appears when Annie feels musically she’s ready to say
something.
Life experience has a lot to do with it. She’ll go through things,
and
she’s affected by things, and it might take a few years to absorb.”
Between Ms. Lennox’s first two solo albums she avoided touring,
raising the two daughters she had with the filmmaker Uri Fruchtmann,
her husband from 1988 to 2000. She and Mr. Stewart reunited to tour
together and make a Eurythmics album, “Peace,” in 1999. She now lives
with her daughters, who are teenagers. Men and relationships, she
said, have been “frankly a big disappointment in my life.”
Ms. Lennox’s 2003 album, “Bare,” recorded in the wake of her divorce,
pondered betrayal and separation in sumptuously orchestrated ballads.
“Songs of Mass Destruction” is more varied and often more muscular.
One song, “Coloured Bedspread,” harks back to the pumping electro of
Eurythmics, while “Ghosts in My Machine” confronts inner demons over
a
driving Louisiana accordion riff as Ms. Lennox sings: “I hurt too
much/I feel too much/I dread too much/I dream too much.”
Though most of the album, Ms. Lennox is the voice of a grown-up woman
alone. From “Dark Road,” the album moves through obsession,
loneliness, self-doubt, rage, determination and the despairing
resignation of “Lost”: a waltz, nearly a lullaby, that envisions
bombs
and torture before holding a glimmer of hope.
One of the new album’s tracks, “Sing,” is directly devoted to a
cause:
the treatment of pregnant women with AIDS to prevent the spread of
H.I.V. to their babies. Ms. Lennox gathered a virtual choir of two
dozen women, including Madonna (who gets a verse of her own),
Shakira,
Bonnie Raitt, Celine Dion, Fergie, Gladys Knight and KT Tunstall.
Downloading “Sing” (and alternate mixes) through Ms. Lennox’s Web
site, annielennox.com, will raise money for the Treatment Action
Campaign in South Africa, where Ms. Lennox is to perform the song for
World AIDS Day on Dec. 1.
“I wrote down a mission statement and sent a letter to a list of
women
that I thought would be really good contenders,” she said. “I had no
idea if anybody would want to get on board with me. It’s the first
time I’ve really ever done anything like this. And I just thought,
‘Oh, be prepared for rejection.’ ” Yet nearly everyone she invited
would appear on the song, recording in studios around the world and
sending tracks for Ms. Lennox and her producers to mix. With a piano
vamp that recalls “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” the song urges,
“Let your voice be heard/What won’t kill you will make you strong.”
“Pain has certainly informed a lot of my songs,” Ms. Lennox said.
“But
there is also soothing and solace and identification and expungement
and, maybe, celebration. I think that life is deeply ironic at all
times, but it has this sweet naïveté and innocence at the same time.
And if you just go for the cynicism and the irony, you just slide
down
into that dark abyss, and you can’t get out of it.
“So you’ve got to kind of work it out for yourself, which is what
I’ve
been trying to do since I was a young child,” she said, “and to
utilize whatever gifts I have in the right kind of way, in the right
direction.”
She added: “I think we’re all wounded, every one of us. And some of
us
end up throwing ourselves off buildings, and some of us manage to
stay
the course. If you just live with pain and you don’t yearn to
transform it, it’s just nihilistic.”
She considered for a moment. “I know what I think nihilistic music
would sound like, and it certainly isn’t the music that I’ve ever
made,” she said. “Because I’d actually quite like to make some very
dark music, but I just think I haven’t made it yet. And I will one
day.”
“Songs of Mass Destruction” is Ms. Lennox’s last album under her
major-label contract with what is now Sony BMG Music Entertainment.
Her next projects are likely to appear on her Web site, where she is
also organizing archives of videos, photos and interviews.
“I’m very grateful for having a record contract,” she said. “That’s
what every musician wanted back then in the day. Because you just
wanted to write and make records and be facilitated. And hopefully if
you sold some, you might be able to make some more.”
As for record executives, “I’ve always kept them at bay,” Ms. Lennox
said. “Even in Eurythmics with Dave, we kept them as far away from us
as possible so that we just were free to make our music and for them
not to interfere with us.”
In a system geared toward blockbusters, Ms. Lennox has been making
million-sellers since her days with Eurythmics. “It’s probably not
chart music anymore,” she said. “Now I can actually make any kind of
music I like. The idea of just making all kinds of music really
appeals to me. Because my voice is very flexible and my interest in
music is very eclectic.”
She listed some possibilities. “It could mean collaborations with
other artists, and I don’t have to check in with anybody else to see
whether that fits my contract,” she said. “I’d like to make a dance
album that’s just purely electronic. I’d like to make a folk album.
I’d like to make a Latin album. I think I would really like to make a
lot more music, to be honest. And I’m hoping that I will.”
Backstage at the Royal Albert Hall concert a few days later, Ms.
Lennox gamely faced cameras and microphones to be a celebrity
spokeswoman for the cause of Peace One Day. “I don’t really want to
be
a pop star,” she confided between rounds of photographs. “I’ve been
trying to avoid that for some time, but it looks like I’m courting it
again. Really, I just want to be a performer and come offstage and
disappear.”
When the time came for her set, Ms. Lennox bounded onstage, lithe and
lean and angular in a sequined black outfit, as her band started
“Little Bird” with a pulsating beat. “I am just a troubled soul who’s
weighted to the ground,” she sang. But she was dancing.
and is planning an American tour.
ANNIE LENNOX is a worrier. She worries about victims of war, about
African children with AIDS, about the poor and the homeless. She
worries about the state of popular music, about every detail of her
album packages and Web site, about her stamina as she gears up for an
American tour after her fourth solo album, “Songs of Mass
Destruction”
(Arista), is released on Tuesday. One thing she doesn’t have to worry
about is whether her songs move people. She can see that for herself.
It happened, for instance, while she was rehearsing with her band
just
over a week ago, at a former biscuit factory in the dreary Bermondsey
neighborhood of London. “Ah, this is the life of glamour,” she said
wryly, with her Scottish burr. In her do-gooder mode, Ms. Lennox was
about to headline a sold-out benefit concert at the Royal Albert Hall
for Peace One Day. It’s an organization that achieved a United
Nations
resolution making Sept. 21 an annual day of peace, and it is now
working to establish that day as a full-scale, worldwide cease-fire.
Other people would do the speechifying at the concert. “At the end of
the day, people just want to be entertained,” she said. So she was
rehearsing a mini-set that tucked her new single, the hymnlike ballad
“Dark Road,” between upbeat (but not necessarily cheerful) oldies
dating back to her solo debut album, “Diva,” and her 1980s albums
with
Eurythmics.
Midway through “There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart),”
which
may well be an elegy masquerading as a love song, one of her backup
singers suddenly heard the words anew and burst into tears. “The song
just opens up,” Ms. Lennox said afterward. “That’s what you’re aiming
for.”
Ms. Lennox, 52, has made a career of music that works at
cross-purposes. In Eurythmics, her duo with Dave Stewart, Ms.
Lennox’s
husky soul singing was the sensual, human element in grids of
synthetic sound. And on her solo albums, beginning with “Diva” in
1992, she has created elegant settings for ever more desolate
thoughts.
“She’s a very strong person and yet one of the most sensitive people
I
know,” said Glen Ballard, who produced the new album. “It’s hard to
keep your eyes open and see all around you the suffering and
unfairness of life. That sensitivity — all humans turn it off as a
practical matter to get through your life. We mask it off, wall it
off, sweep it under the rug. And I don’t think Annie ever does that.
She feels everything, and the only catharsis for her is the music.
With all of the stuff she feels, if she couldn’t express it through
her music she’d implode.”
Ms. Lennox has made just four solo albums in 15 years, and one of
them, “Medusa” in 1995, was a collection of other people’s songs. For
Ms. Lennox, writing is an essentially private experience, starting in
a room with a piano. “It’s hard work because you don’t know what
you’re writing about,” she said. “You’re just working on the hunch
that maybe it’s possible that some idea might fly into your head or
come out of your mouth, or the piano might have some beautiful chords
that you might respond to, that you could just catch long enough to
hold on to.”
Ms. Lennox recalled the writing of what may still be her best-known
song, Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” She had just had
a bitter fight with Mr. Stewart, who remained her musical
collaborator
after their romance ended in 1980. “I thought it was the end of the
road and that was that,” she said. “We were trying to write, and I
was
miserable. And he just went, well, ‘I’ll do this anyway.’ ” Mr.
Stewart came up with a beat, Ms. Lennox doodled the octave-hopping
synthesizer riff, and suddenly they realized they had something.
“I sometimes think the creative process is like this,” she said.
“Sometimes you get to a really bad place, like that, something
really,
really bad. And then it just goes, and oof — something comes. It’s
almost like the storm before the calm.”
Mike Stevens, her band’s music director and demo producer, said: “An
album appears when Annie feels musically she’s ready to say
something.
Life experience has a lot to do with it. She’ll go through things,
and
she’s affected by things, and it might take a few years to absorb.”
Between Ms. Lennox’s first two solo albums she avoided touring,
raising the two daughters she had with the filmmaker Uri Fruchtmann,
her husband from 1988 to 2000. She and Mr. Stewart reunited to tour
together and make a Eurythmics album, “Peace,” in 1999. She now lives
with her daughters, who are teenagers. Men and relationships, she
said, have been “frankly a big disappointment in my life.”
Ms. Lennox’s 2003 album, “Bare,” recorded in the wake of her divorce,
pondered betrayal and separation in sumptuously orchestrated ballads.
“Songs of Mass Destruction” is more varied and often more muscular.
One song, “Coloured Bedspread,” harks back to the pumping electro of
Eurythmics, while “Ghosts in My Machine” confronts inner demons over
a
driving Louisiana accordion riff as Ms. Lennox sings: “I hurt too
much/I feel too much/I dread too much/I dream too much.”
Though most of the album, Ms. Lennox is the voice of a grown-up woman
alone. From “Dark Road,” the album moves through obsession,
loneliness, self-doubt, rage, determination and the despairing
resignation of “Lost”: a waltz, nearly a lullaby, that envisions
bombs
and torture before holding a glimmer of hope.
One of the new album’s tracks, “Sing,” is directly devoted to a
cause:
the treatment of pregnant women with AIDS to prevent the spread of
H.I.V. to their babies. Ms. Lennox gathered a virtual choir of two
dozen women, including Madonna (who gets a verse of her own),
Shakira,
Bonnie Raitt, Celine Dion, Fergie, Gladys Knight and KT Tunstall.
Downloading “Sing” (and alternate mixes) through Ms. Lennox’s Web
site, annielennox.com, will raise money for the Treatment Action
Campaign in South Africa, where Ms. Lennox is to perform the song for
World AIDS Day on Dec. 1.
“I wrote down a mission statement and sent a letter to a list of
women
that I thought would be really good contenders,” she said. “I had no
idea if anybody would want to get on board with me. It’s the first
time I’ve really ever done anything like this. And I just thought,
‘Oh, be prepared for rejection.’ ” Yet nearly everyone she invited
would appear on the song, recording in studios around the world and
sending tracks for Ms. Lennox and her producers to mix. With a piano
vamp that recalls “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” the song urges,
“Let your voice be heard/What won’t kill you will make you strong.”
“Pain has certainly informed a lot of my songs,” Ms. Lennox said.
“But
there is also soothing and solace and identification and expungement
and, maybe, celebration. I think that life is deeply ironic at all
times, but it has this sweet naïveté and innocence at the same time.
And if you just go for the cynicism and the irony, you just slide
down
into that dark abyss, and you can’t get out of it.
“So you’ve got to kind of work it out for yourself, which is what
I’ve
been trying to do since I was a young child,” she said, “and to
utilize whatever gifts I have in the right kind of way, in the right
direction.”
She added: “I think we’re all wounded, every one of us. And some of
us
end up throwing ourselves off buildings, and some of us manage to
stay
the course. If you just live with pain and you don’t yearn to
transform it, it’s just nihilistic.”
She considered for a moment. “I know what I think nihilistic music
would sound like, and it certainly isn’t the music that I’ve ever
made,” she said. “Because I’d actually quite like to make some very
dark music, but I just think I haven’t made it yet. And I will one
day.”
“Songs of Mass Destruction” is Ms. Lennox’s last album under her
major-label contract with what is now Sony BMG Music Entertainment.
Her next projects are likely to appear on her Web site, where she is
also organizing archives of videos, photos and interviews.
“I’m very grateful for having a record contract,” she said. “That’s
what every musician wanted back then in the day. Because you just
wanted to write and make records and be facilitated. And hopefully if
you sold some, you might be able to make some more.”
As for record executives, “I’ve always kept them at bay,” Ms. Lennox
said. “Even in Eurythmics with Dave, we kept them as far away from us
as possible so that we just were free to make our music and for them
not to interfere with us.”
In a system geared toward blockbusters, Ms. Lennox has been making
million-sellers since her days with Eurythmics. “It’s probably not
chart music anymore,” she said. “Now I can actually make any kind of
music I like. The idea of just making all kinds of music really
appeals to me. Because my voice is very flexible and my interest in
music is very eclectic.”
She listed some possibilities. “It could mean collaborations with
other artists, and I don’t have to check in with anybody else to see
whether that fits my contract,” she said. “I’d like to make a dance
album that’s just purely electronic. I’d like to make a folk album.
I’d like to make a Latin album. I think I would really like to make a
lot more music, to be honest. And I’m hoping that I will.”
Backstage at the Royal Albert Hall concert a few days later, Ms.
Lennox gamely faced cameras and microphones to be a celebrity
spokeswoman for the cause of Peace One Day. “I don’t really want to
be
a pop star,” she confided between rounds of photographs. “I’ve been
trying to avoid that for some time, but it looks like I’m courting it
again. Really, I just want to be a performer and come offstage and
disappear.”
When the time came for her set, Ms. Lennox bounded onstage, lithe and
lean and angular in a sequined black outfit, as her band started
“Little Bird” with a pulsating beat. “I am just a troubled soul who’s
weighted to the ground,” she sang. But she was dancing.
