SWEET DREAMS, ANNIE

In her new album, Lennox soars on hope and falls into despair

ANNIE LENNOX is a worrier. She worries about African children with AIDS, 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, following the release of her fourth solo album, Songs of Mass Destruction, last week. One thing she doesn’t have to worry about is whether her songs move people.

It happened while she was rehearsing with her band, in the dreary Bermondsey neighbourhood of London. In her do-gooder mode, Lennox was about to headline a sold-out benefit concert at the Royal Albert Hall for Peace One Day. She was rehearsing her new single, the hymnlike ballad Dark Road.

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.

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Lennox, 52, has made a career of music that works at cross-purposes. In Eurythmics, her duo with Dave Stewart, 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.

Lennox has made just four solo albums in 15 years. For Lennox, writing is an essentially private experience, starting in a room with a piano. “You don’t know what you’re writing about,” she said. “You’re just working on the hunch that maybe some idea might fly into your head or come out of your mouth.”

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 Stewart, who remained her musical collaborator after their romance ended in 1980. “I thought it was the end of the road,” she said. “I was miserable. And he just went, well, ‘I’ll do this anyway.’

Stewart came up with a beat, Lennox doodled the octave-hopping synthesizer riff, and suddenly they had something.

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Between 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 Stewart reunited to tour together and make a Eurythmics album, Peace, in 1999.

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. Ghosts in My Machine confronts inner demons over a driving Louisiana accordion riff: “I hurt too much/I feel too much/I dread too much/I dream too much.”

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 album’s tracks, Sing, is devoted to a cause: the treatment of pregnant women with AIDS. Lennox gathered two dozen women, including Madonna, Shakira, Bonnie Raitt, Celine Dion, Fergie, Gladys Knight and KT Tunstall.

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“I sent a letter to a list of women that I thought would be really good contenders,” she said. Nearly everyone she invited would appear on the song. “Pain has certainly informed a lot of my songs,” Lennox said. “But there is also soothing and solace and identification and expungement. Life is deeply ironic, but it has this sweet naïveté and innocence at the same time.

“I think we’re all wounded. And some of us end up throwing ourselves off buildings, and some of us manage to stay the course.”

-JON PARELES (NYT)