ANNIE LENNOX - SONGS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

ALBUM REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS

Radio Times:
Heart & Soul

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Out Magazine:
The Ghosts in Her Machines

Annie Lennox on her new album, the problem with men, and why we all need to care more about Africa.

Aaron Hicklin

Annie Lennox's fourth solo album, Songs of Mass Destruction, is not quite her best (that accolade belongs to 1992's Diva), but thanks in part to "Sing," her much ballyhooed collaboration with Madonna, Celine Dion, and Gladys Knight among a cast of thousands, it's certainly her most ambitious. Opener "Dark Road" and its immediate successors "Love is Blind," "Smithereens," and "Ghosts In My Machine," represent some of Lennox's strongest offerings to date, in which her brooding introspection is tempered with spry, robust melodies. It's the same story with the heart-meltingly beautiful "Big Sky,"—the best track on the album—in which her voice flutters and soars to rare heights. Despite her iconic status as one half of the Eurythmics, Lennox has long been a reluctant interviewee, wary of letting her celebrity eclipse her craft, or—in this case—her message. In one of her few interviews for the US press, the 52-year old singer lets loose.

How do you feel when you look back at the Annie of 25 years ago?
"It's quite intense, it's a hell of a journey, a load of work, and a lot of aspirations to achieving things, artistically, and in all kinds of ways that now, I just think, How the hell did we as The Eurythmics ever do that? It took me a while to assess the whole thing, to take stock of it, and I started to do that about four years ago. I had this warehouse that was all full of awards and disks and things, and I took it upon myself to start to be accountable for these things, and got them out of their bubble wrap and their dusty filthy whatever, and it was a kind of clearing, symbolically, because I'd never really thought much about it. An artist is always going on to the next, it's always more interesting—next, next, next—what's done is done and you're on to the next. At that point I thought I'd like to take stock of everything, take photographs of everything and put it on a website that will launch hopefully in October called Annie Lennox: the house of Me—and it is a house, and the rooms will enable you to see all the things that used to be wrapped in bubble wrap under dust, things that I didn't used to think about very much. I love the idea of a virtual world that you can step into; there's your life's work, there's the body of it, and you can keep adding to it, and I find that really interesting.

And for Annie junkies, even more of an insight into your life and work.
Definitely an aspect of it. No-one, unless they're my really close friend can really know me, any more than I can really know anyone else. That's what's so interesting about our existence: How well do you actually know a person? People assume they know me, but actually it's my projection. I never got into anyone myself, in that kind of way; I love people's work but I'm not obsessively interested in the minutiae.

But I think that's a dichotomy there for all musicians, andespecially musicians like yourself. Your music is so emotive that listeners are inevitably going to create a relationship with you because of it.
That's dead interesting because I was just with someone earlier today—a lovely guy called Jason who comes to fix my computer when it goes down—and he said, "Oh, I forgot about who you are as Annie Lennox, I see you as a human being." [laughs]. I said, "Thank god for that." Very few people would ever have that experience, of others not quite seeing them as human, but then I would feel that way of other artists, too, because I'm a bit in awe of other artists, but nevertheless it's terribly important to be a human being.

From this perspective it seems there will always be at least two Annies: public Annie, the Annie of the music, and the private Annie.
The thing that I didn't buy into was the celebrity industry, but I've tried as much as I can to stay beneath the radar, because I can see that is a really odd place to be, and people seem to want it, and they want it for the wrong reasons. They yearn for this so-called celebritydom, but they have nothing to offer behind them, so it's just them—it's just them wearing a dress, or it's them showing up at a party, or it's them having their pubic hair photographed as they're getting out of a limousine, and I'm like, 'Shit, that is scary, I don't like that.' I see that as a goldfish bowl that doesn't appeal to me, and the only reason for it is because it makes money. That's the only reason. Money.
The idea of celebrity for celebrity's sake and not driven by real talent in a sense.
No artistry or social commentary or intelligence or creativity or anything else. It's what Warhol predicted all those years ago, and we're getting it back in spades, and we're getting it back because we're asking for it. We're feeding the monster, and it's built on people's lack of self-worth, inferiority, and they are looking to others, and at the same time they desire their downfall. It's a slightly sick phenomena, I think.

With all your albums, I often feel like I'm in one of your therapy sessions, and if they find an audience that's great, but they're really songs written for yourself.
I can't write a song for an audience, because I don't know how to do that, so it's an expression of one's innermost feelings, but at the same time it's universal. Life is paradoxical. I can be intensely private and incredibly open at the same time, and I can also be very straightforward and very complicated, or I could be immensely dark person and at the same time have so much light potential. It's not that people are hypocrites, it's that we contain these contradictions.

Although listening to your music I get the feeling that you find more of your material in pain as opposed to pleasure. At one point you quite literally scream, "Come and take this pain away".
Yes, yeah well I'm struggling with it, I think everyone struggles with pain, and I think somehow externalizing it or coming to terms with it is by transforming it into something of beauty and power.

In contrast to your last album, Bare, the melodies themselves seem more upbeat and that creates a great tension with the lyrics. It's very compelling.
It's weird, but I started to discover that I had another aspect to my voice that I hadn't encountered before, and it was kind of more open or raw, and it made me feel that I was almost channeling deep Mississippi delta blues, or some kind of spiritual place, very black, real black African. It's something in me, and it comes out of me, but I'm white and I'm not pretending, but that's the place where I feel most authentic, when I'm singing like that.

And you've always gravitated to singers like that—you covered Dusty in your Tourists era, and there was your collaboration with Aretha on "Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves." And on "Sing," on this album, you collaborate with a bunch of female vocalists, including Gladys Knight. What was the idea behind that?
I think it was a question of timing. I almost never write a song with a preconceived notion behind it, but I thought, Look, I've got this opportunity, and I need to fuse my activist concerns with my artistic vehicle, and since going to South Africa several years ago, where I met, with other musicians, Nelson Mandela, I started to understand the enormous impact that HIV and AIDS have had in the form of the pandemic that has devastated people in this country, by the millions and when I heard Mandela describe this pandemic as a genocide, I really sat up and took notice, and thought, The world doesn't know it. It might know that there's an issue with HIV/AIDS in Africa, but it doesn't know there's a genocide going on, and it became my moral imperative from that moment on to try to become a voice for this issue, especially for women, because women very often do not have a voice. They are very often victims of domestic violence or domestic abuse, and they are in fact the mothers, the ones who are giving birth to children who, if their mothers could get access to anti-retroviral treatment, would have a chance of being born free of the virus. I feel incredibly strongly about this issue, and I'm not leaving it alone. You know, the abolitionists came in and changed slavery. This is, to me, a very similar story. Slavery hasn't gone away, and people who are raising peoples' consciousness about social injustice are coming to it from the historical viewpoint of the abolitionists.

What's the solution?
I think at the moment there is a great deal of shift. If you look at the great number of grass roots organizations, there are people working on the front lines, millions of these organizations, and I just don't understand why Paris Hilton is more interesting than a woman in a hospital trying to save peoples lives against all odds in a flood of death. These people are absolutely incredible and heroic, and we need to celebrate that. That leads to social awareness and a drive for change. The HIV epidemic in Africa could have been dealt with really effectively ten years ago, but unfortunately President Mbeki and his health minister took a denialist stance, and a generation has been wiped out—millions of children have been left as orphans. Sorry, I'm talking very stridently, but I feel really strongly about it. I'm not interested in what Lindsay Lohan is doing, bless her; she might be going into rehab for the third time, but it's not about Lindsay Lohan, it's about the media driving this complete inane pointlessness. I don't get it.

You've always had a huge dedicated following among gay men. Have you given any thought to why that might be.
I've thought about why historically gay men are drawn to somewhat emotive, dramatic female singers. They seem to identify with them very strongly. The more developed female side of a homosexual man must identify with pain and femininity in some way.

Several of the songs on this album are addressed to women. Do you think men are the problem in our society?
Yes, I do. I think there's something really odd about the testosterone-driven need to go to war, and fight, and the ego that's so insatiable, so power hungry, and yet so insecure. I slightly despair, in a way, of women ever having reasonable partnerships with heterosexual men, because I think we're just such different creatures, on such different planets. I think that's why homosexual men seem to get on so much better with each other, because they know their own mindset so much better.

Does it matter to you that you're not in a relationship?
I think relationships, whether friendly or intimate, are immensely complex, and certainly my position doesn't simplify things particularly. It hasn't been a smooth journey—I'm just trying now to be the best human being I can, and I'm learning, and sometimes I do despair, that's obvious--you can see that I put myself through the wringer—but there's a good reason to live, and there you have it. I've just come back from South Africa where I've been with orphans who have no mother or father, and no close family to even take care of them, and I think that's kind of pretty tough, so if I'm not in an intimate relationship that's not the worse thing in the world.

Your relationships do seem to have had a powerful influence on you?
Yeah, well, I feel things really strongly. All my relationships have been very intense in all kinds of ways, and obviously I've drawn from that. At the end of the day, when all's said and done I do want to be a loving person, that's the ultimate thing that all human beings can be—a respectful, loving person... it's just never been that simple.

Does God exist?
It depends who's using the word God and how they're using it. God is a term to describe the universal life force and its manifestation in all its life forms, which is highly mysterious, and some organized religions have come up with some books that are supposed to explain it all to us. The only trouble is, when I see how they behave I don't see much love, compassion or respect. And so those dogmas concern me, because they deal with an us versus them, and I think God is surely inclusive of all things, because that is the Creation after all.

Do you communicate with fans on Myspace?
Yes! I have a little forum going on, I love it... It's marvelous, because there's no middle man. Through Myspace, if I want to send a statement or a blog, it's direct, it's for me, and there's no censorship, or even an editor, it's just me.

In an interview in The Face in 1985 you said, 'If I disappear tomorrow not many people would remember me." That's obviously not an option any longer, but how would you like to be remembered?
Fondly.

How long will we have to wait for the next Annie Lennox album?
Now that I've created this album I'd like to be more forthcoming with my musical output, definitely. The future is interesting, because my dream is that "Sing" is a kind of brand name of a project that can go on in partnerships with other female artists to raise awareness and hopefully financial benefits to, for grass roots projects.

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Le Parisien:
Les Engagements d'Annie Lennox

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You Magazine / Mail On Sunday:
The return of Annie Lennox

Stuart Husband

Annie Lennox — hailed as 'the greatest living white soul singer' — has always worn her political heart on her sleeve. She reveals why she believes passionately in using her rock star status to influence other people

Annie Lennox is admiring my ancient tape machine.

"You can't buy cassettes any more, can you?" she asks plaintively.

"I've still got a bunch in an old shoe box. Things just become outmoded and obsolete. Including me." She qualifies herself with a grin.

"Well, almost."

It's entirely typical of her self-deprecatory nature that Lennox should be flirting with the concept of obsolescence – despite being anointed by music TV channel VH1 as "the greatest living white soul singer".

The statistics supporting that claim are impressive: nearly 80 million sales worldwide with Eurythmics and as a solo artist; four Grammys; five Ivor Novellos; a Best Song Oscar (for "Into the West", from The Lord of the Rings), and eight Brits – the most for a woman).

The truth is that, following her gender-bending omnipresence in the 80s, her comparatively meagre solo output – four albums in more than two decades – has been punctuated by personal grief: the death of her parents, a stillborn son, Daniel, in 1988, and the break-up of her second marriage, to Daniel's father, Israeli film producer Uri Fruchtmann.

Even in her pop heyday, Lennox had a somewhat pensive, careworn air – something she attributes to her "working-class Aberdonian Presbyterian puritanical streak" – and with each setback she seemed to retreat further, to the point where the media was treating her as a tragic recluse, whose infrequent forays into the spotlight saw her described as "troubled" or "gaunt".

"Yes," she says, sipping water in the ornate drawing room of a West London hotel, not far from her Notting Hill home, "I did get a lot of that at one point.

"And maybe I was looking quite gaunt, probably because I was going through some hard times.

"But that's not the full story. I took time out to bring up my kids [she has two daughters with Fruchtmann, Lola, now 16, and Tali, 14], and music had to take its turn along with everything else.

"I'm a little slow and painstaking and I compartmentalise everything. It's the only way I can function."

I wonder if she's found life as a solo artist nerve-rackingly exposing, without her wigs and suits – and the wilful eccentricities of Dave Stewart, her former lover and Eurythmics collaborator – to hide behind.

She considers this.

"The grass is always greener, let's put it that way," she says.

"Partnership is great, but autonomy is great too.

"The thing with partnership, and I'm talking about all kinds of marriages here," she continues with a wry smile, "is that people grow and change, they have divergent interests and opinions, and that can be a little bit tricky when you're supposed to be this “unit”.

"I'll always be very close to Dave – I stay with him when I'm in Los Angeles and we talk whenever we get the chance.

"But I think it's good that I'm alone and taking full responsibility right now. "And," she adds, almost defiantly, "I think I'm doing OK, all things considered."

At 52, Lennox is certainly looking OK – her dyed-white hair is a little longer and choppier, softening the severity of her angular (and naturally borderline-gaunt) face.

A red gingham blouse and a pair of purple ballet pumps further accentuate an animated femininity.

Her Scottish burr is soft but intent, and she chooses her words assiduously, leaving no room for ambiguity or misinterpretation.

An uncharacteristic trace of pride creeps in when she discusses her new album, Songs of Mass Destruction, which banishes any notion that she might remain an analogue artist in a digital age.

Over a lush, adult-pop soundscape, Lennox's voice, which seems to have acquired even greater intensity and delicacy, explores her lyrical preoccupations; what she calls "this stuff that's within me and all of us, the unrequited love, the lack of peace, the chaos of thoughts and memories.

"These songs are my way of channelling those feelings and expelling that pain. I want people to connect with my songs.

"I want people to feel, “My God, she's singing about my life.”"

Lennox sounds alternately elegiac, vibrant and irascible.

"I've given everything on this album," says Lennox.

"The common perception is, the older you get, the blunter you become, but I'm actually feeling sharper, more connected to what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, intellectually, spiritually and politically, than I've ever felt before."

The "p" word is key to her continuing motivation, "the answer to the challenge I've sometimes faced in getting up and out of the door in the morning".

She's a passionate proponent of the Geldof-Bono school of using her position to "make a difference"; all the proceeds from the Eurythmics' reunion tour a couple of years ago went to Amnesty International, and among the "friends" on her MySpace page are the Dalai Lama and Free Tibet Campaign, Make Poverty History, Greenpeace, Fairtrade and Unicef.

Humour doesn't come naturally to Lennox, and earnestness can be her default position – a throwaway enquiry about whether Songs of Mass Destruction is a consolation prize for the failure to find the Iraqi weapons inspires a cogent denunciation of the war and a fulmination against politicians in general and Tony Blair in particular – although when she says she's "disgusted by our obsession with celebrity magazines and their dumbed-down subjects," she qualifies it by confessing, with a grin, "I do pick them up if they're around, and I hate myself for it, but I never buy them. That's my get-out.

"I don't want to be preachy," she continues, with a look of entreaty.

"But of course I sound it, don't I?

"I'm going to come across as a soapbox-sermonising moralist, and what right do I have, as a rock star with my millions, to tell other people how to behave?" She shakes her head.

"True, all true. But I know that I want to use my position and my music, which people have an interest in, to become an activist and point them in particular directions.

"And HIV-Aids in Africa is the issue that's drawn me in with a vengeance."

Lennox has become deeply involved with South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign (Tac) – an organisation calling for human rights, education and healthcare for all those affected by the virus, against a background where one in three South African women are HIV-positive.

"Nelson Mandela called it a genocide," she says.

"I've been there and seen the reality behind the statistics, and that turned it into something very tangible for me.

"There's been no real leadership from the South African government on the issue, and millions of lives could have been saved simply with access to antiretroviral treatment.

"So Tac is trying is speak for these women who don't have a voice."

To that end, the new album features a female-empowerment anthem called "Sing", which will be available in download and single formats, with all profits going to Tac initiatives.

Its rousing chorus features 23 of the planet's top female singers – Celine Dion, Joss Stone, Madonna, Dido, Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas and Shakira, among others – dubbed "the choir of 23" by Lennox.

She sent out a "little letter" requesting their services, "and everyone who was around came back and did it", she marvels.

"I asked them to join in the chorus, but Madonna sang the second verse as well." Was that because she just couldn't bear to play second fiddle?

"No, it was really cool of her," insists Lennox.

"Look, I'll be as mercenary with this as I need to be. Madonna has a huge audience, and her involvement will help to spread the word wider."

The fact that Lennox doesn't bristle at the Madonna jibe is testament to the fact that she's easing up a little on the rigidity that previous interviewers have noted; a trait that can be traced back to her hardscrabble Aberdeen tenement upbringing, the only child of a shipyard-worker father and school-cook mother.

"I don't feel as defensive as I used to," she affirms.

"I've always been at odds with parts of myself; I always had a hugely romantic streak which I would hide behind a mask of Scottish stoicism.

"But then, I practically ran away from home at 14 and I had to be tough when I was starting out in the music business; audiences were spitting at me and I had to prove that I had credibility.

"I was edgy and afraid and found it hard to connect with people; I thought they were untrustworthy or out to get me, which, by the way, often turned out to be the case."

And now? Lennox credits the birth of her children with her change of perspective.

"All that stuff just dropped away," she says.

"I'd outgrown it."

She also uses words like "journey" and "acceptance" with an alacrity that makes you suspect she's not unfamiliar with the self-help section of bookshops.

"Listen," she says with a huge laugh, "I am the self-help section of the bookshop.

"I'd like to be a little more at peace – because there are many things that bother me hugely, in case you hadn't noticed." She smiles.

"But you have to keep it together to an extent, for the sake of your kids."

As the parent of two teenagers, Lennox declares herself "shocked" that they occasionally regard her as a Hideous Embarrassment: "I never thought that would happen to me.

"But I love my kids so much," she continues, "and I love the fact that they're grown-ups who are getting to be taller than me.

"We have some fantastic discussions, and…oh, stop me waxing lyrical," she implores.

Does she now empathise more with her own parents' struggles?

"That's tricky," she says.

"They came from that postwar age, a time of privation. I remember a sad thing my father used to say: “I never had a youth.”

"It must have been hard when his only daughter was growing up in the 60s, going to San Francisco and burning joss sticks.

"I think there's much less of a generation gap between my kids and me.

"There's an openness, an ability to communicate; some of the self-help psychobabble has actually served me quite well.

"If anything, we overanalyse everything. But there's so much to take on," she continues, back in crusader mode, "from the way the multinationals target kids to the overstuffed goodie-bags you're obliged to provide at parties."

She grins sheepishly. "Our kids are hugely overprivileged. It's…complicated."

But despite, or perhaps because of, it all, Annie Lennox soldiers on.

When asked if she's optimistic about the future, her romantic and stoic streaks tussle for supremacy.

"I'll have happy moments," she says.

"I'll also have angry, frustrated and probably tragic ones.

"In that, I'm no different from anyone else. I'm getting on with it, so I'm giving myself a pat on the back, because there's no one else to do it."

She qualifies that quickly: "Well, my friends do, but there are no parents or extended family or lover to do it."

For a second she looks vanquished, then she rallies with a grin.

"Actually, I get some very nice comments on MySpace.

"That'll do to be going on with." And she settles back, not ready to go the way of the cassette tape just yet.

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The Telegraph (UK):
Annie Lennox: Diva singing through the darkness

Last Updated: 20/09/2007

Annie Lennox – owner of one of the most thrilling, seductive voices in pop – reveals why her new album is filled with so many songs of loss and longing Neil McCormick

When I tell Annie Lennox I have been listening intently to her new album, she exclaims "Help!" in mock panic.

Powerful presence: Annie Lennox's voice has stood the test of time
When I mention a song of suicidal despair, she holds out her bare arms and shows me her wrists. "There's no Band-Aids on me yet," she says.

At 52, she is looking elegant and strong, her narrow, high-boned face occasionally lit up by a teeth-baring, almost feral grin.

I recently saw her perform an extraordinary show with the BBC concert orchestra, and I was reminded again of the formidable potency and power of her presence, the range and sweep of her high, clear voice and the fabulous catalogue of perfect pop songs on which she can draw.

They are full of clever ideas and true emotions driven home by relentless hooks, from storming Eurythmics classics such as Sweet Dreams and Here Comes the Rain to tremulous solo ballads such as Why, surely one of the greatest songs ever written. There is really no one quite like her.

Over 30 years, Lennox has maintained a striking image, often verging on the androgynous yet somehow embodying innate qualities of feminine strength, intelligence and independence.

With a facility for engaging with the plasticity of pop music yet retaining a quality of high minded artistic truth, she has arguably been the most significant female artist of modern British pop.

Yet I have to admit that I did have concerns for her well-being. When last we heard from her, with her 2003 album Bare, she was recovering from her second divorce.

Beneath the seductively melodic surface, the rawness of her emotional state was documented on a desolate and often self-lacerating song cycle.

Four years later, she is back with Songs of Mass Destruction, a title hardly suggestive of joie de vivre.

While the album pulses along with rhythmic energy and glittering, expansive arrangements, it is full of longing for something lost, marked by an almost desperate need to reclaim love and find meaning in a harsh, punishing life.

The album starts with Lennox walking a Dark Road, revolves around her looking Through a Glass Darkly and concludes with her clinging to a Fingernail Moon. It all suggests its creator is not in a happy place.

"It is a dark album, but the world is a dark place," she responds, in modulated Scottish tones. "It's fraught, it's turbulent. Most people's lives are underscored with dramas of all kinds: there's ups, there's downs - the flickering candle.

"The human condition is that you are born and the only certainty you have is that you are going to die. Looking around at what human beings have done in terms of abuse to themselves and each other and to the planet, it's just horrendous."

Lennox speaks in a torrent of huge, sprawling sentences, with clauses and sub-clauses that take a great deal of concentration to follow.

She is eloquent – even poetic – but, on the big subjects (life, death, ethics, morality, meaning) which she says she "frequently ponders", her underlying pessimism verges on the brutal.

On the album, she addresses global warming, the war in Iraq, the Aids pandemic in Africa, religious conflict, political corruption, business greed, global poverty and rampant inequality.

"This planet is absolutely off its head. It's insane," she says. "It is Hieronymus Bosch out there. Half the people are drinking or drugging themselves to numb it. A lot of people are in pain."

Well aware of how bleak she can sound, Lennox makes several attempts to counterbalance this, although for all her protests about her appreciation of beauty, the darkness never seems far behind.

"We contain polarity within ourselves, we are full of possibilities, light and beauty and goodness, but at the same time we are ravaged by doubt or despair or hopelessness. I have been through my own trials and tribulations, so in a way I am trying to make sense of it. But its not about a logical, rational sense. The language of music expresses things that are almost inexpressible."

Bold and unshrinking, Lennox has always embodied feminine strength, yet she says the depressiveness has always been with her. "I am just one of those creatures that has that magnetic pull towards the melancholic. It's been a hard call. There is that thread running through the Celtic identity. It's not happy-clappy, that's for sure."

Lennox was an only child. The daughter of a shipyard worker in Aberdeen, she grew up in a tenement flat in an environment she has characterised as "harsh".

"I didn't come out with a stamp guarantee on my backside that said, 'SONGWRITER'," she laughs. "It feels as if maybe I just invented that potentiality in myself. Maybe I was supposed to be a hairdresser really!"

She was something of a musical prodigy, studying classical piano and flute at school and going on to win a place at the Royal Academy of Music.

Yet, despite the enormous global success she enjoyed with Dave Stewart in pioneering electropop duo Eurythmics (nine hit albums between 1981 and 1989) and as a solo artist, there have been long periods of silence: this is only her fourth solo album in 17 years, with one Eurythmics reunion album in 1999.

In part, she ascribes this simply to backing off from the limelight when she had her first child in 1990. "I wanted to embrace a more ordinary, domestic life." Lennox has two daughters, Lola, 16, and Tali, 14. "I have got be around my kids, so it's tricky."

There was a time when women in pop were a rarity; now they are in abundance, with new talents such as Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen, Kate Nash, Beth Ditto and Bat for Lashes often outperforming their male counterparts.

While these are women who, in large part, refuse to conform to stereotype, it will be interesting to see how their careers develop in an industry still governed by an old-fashioned sexism.

Lennox says she used to feel patronised by gender questions but now feels women have "a totally different experience to men in music".

One track on her album Sing is a feminist anthem inspired by Aids activists in South Africa, with all profits going to TAC (Treatment Action Campaign). To direct the widest possible demographic towards the issue, Lennox assembled a chorus line of 23 of the most famous women in pop, including Madonna, Joss Stone, Dido, Shakira, Pink and Celine Dion.

"Unfortunately, we weren't all able to be in the same room at the same time. Now that could really have got interesting – all the queens," she says.

"We would have been able to share experiences that were common only to those who walked the line. Only a few really stay the course, but it doesn't matter: people come up, they go down, it's all part of the same big pool of music-making. Nobody says you have to be here for ever. You won't be anyway. Unless you're Joni Mitchell."

Lennox speaks with huge enthusiasm about music, her introduction to composers such as Delius, Mahler, Debussy and Satie, and the pleasure of drawing connections between them and delta blues, folk and R&B.

"I'm just intrigued with the beauty between the major and the minor chord, and the challenge of creating something magic that is outside me and inside me, too."

When she talks about the creative process, particularly the mysteries of songwriting, "working with invisible stuff, trying to grab and grasp things, freefalling with it", Lennox really comes alive, and you can start to see where the joy in her music comes from, the uplift that somehow makes her pessimism so palatable.

On the blues stomper Love is Blind, Lennox seems to flirt with her most destructive aspect, singing, "Sometimes I feel like I don't exist /Cut my veins and slit my wrists." Yet her performance is paradoxically exhilarating, as she emits whoops of delight in the face of suicidal despair.

"Joy must be in there. That must be where the whoops come from," she says. "I think it's about embodying some sensibility in music that is celebratory and wild and untamed. I love entering into the spirit of the song. I have a few whoops in me, let me tell you."

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HMV:
SONGS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

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CBS News:
Annie Lennox Gets On A Soapbox

Former Eurythmics Singer's New Album "Songs Of Mass Destruction" Is Decidedly Political

Annie Lennox, called the thinking person's rock star, sees music as a platform for discussing politics and social issues.

Annie Lennox has sold 78 million albums in the past 25 years, has won four Grammys and even an Academy Award.

But the gold and platinum records she has just put up on her walls (they were lying around on the floor until recently) aren't so much trophies as they are links to the life she has lead while making them.

"Each one of these discs, they're all places and musicians and studios and late nights and terrible despair and terrible ecstasy," she told CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips.

Despair and ecstasy, and everything in-between … could be the title of the Annie Lennox songbook - only big themes will do for an artist considered the thinking person's rock star.

Famous for her 1980s hit with the Eurythmics, "Sweet Dreams," Lennox makes a grand re-entrance into the limelight with her fourth solo album, "Songs of Mass Destruction." It's not an accidental title.

The songs aren't overtly preachy, except for maybe one called "Sing," about the scourge of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa.

Normally she takes a more subtle, indirect approach to politics and social issues, but Lennox admits her popularity gives her the soapbox from which she can promote the humanitarian causes she believes in.

"In a way I use my music as a kind of vehicle and platform from a broader base where I can talk about these issues," she said. "Because I think they are immensely important. And why wouldn't people want to know what an artist thinks about, you know, issues that are of incredible relevance to our present day life?

"I've always been a thinker. I've been an over-thinker probably, I'm always analyzing things. And I find it so fascinating, you know, this consciousness - what is intelligence? And what is creativity?"

Questioning the world and her place in it was something she was conscious of from the beginning. The working-class, only child of a baker and a boilermaker from Aberdeen, Scotland, took some time to find the path that would lead to fame and fortune.

Early on, she showed some talent for music, but not for academics.

"I grew up feeling always that I was not intelligent," Lennox said. "Because I went to an academic school where I realized I had more of an artistic bent. And it left me with a little bit of an inferiority complex. Because I thought I'm not bright. For some reason I really sucked at math, and still do."

She got into a London music academy, dropped out when she found it too restricting, and drifted around until 1980 when she teamed up with another struggling musician, Dave Stewart, and something happened.

"We found something that was a particular sound, a particular style, and that was really thrilling in a way," she said. "Because I think that is the journey as a creative artist, to find something authentic and identifiable."

Lennox and Stewart became the Eurythmics, a pioneering duo that pushed the envelope of electronic rock and the developing new medium of music videos.

In 1983 they released "Sweet Dreams," a song whose title summed up their own lives and would make them world-wide stars. They recorded 8 albums in eight years, but Lennox then decided to follow her own sweet dreams, and went solo.

"I don't believe in standing still," she said. "I don't believe in finding a formula that works commercially and then you do the same thing again because, you know, it worked the last time: 'We'll do it again.' That's really boring for me. I like to experiment and explore with music. That's the joy of the creative process."

Over the next 15 years she would release only two more albums, ignoring the record executives who wanted more: more work, a more "commercial" sound.

"As far as the record company is concerned, the main interest was to keep them at bay," she said. "I mean, people that paint paintings don't have the gallery owner standing behind them saying, 'Could you just paint that a bit more blue, because blue is what's selling this year,' you know?"

But her output dropped, she says, because she went domestic - got married, had two daughters, and got divorced (twice) - yet along the way becoming an even bigger, and more iconic star.

Big enough to be chosen in 2004 to co-write and sing the Oscar-winning theme song for the last of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy called "Into the West."

At age 52 Lennox may have earned the right to a satisfied backward glance on all she's accomplished, but she's much too busy looking forward to the songs still waiting to be sung and how they might possibly change the world, or at least people's attitudes to it.

"And I think that's a magical thing," Lennox said. "That's what music does. Music is really a precious thing to me."

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Amazon.com:
Songs Of Mass Destruction

Tammy La Gorce

Menacing as they sound, the songs of mass destruction gathered on Annie Lennox's fifth solo disc don't manage to so much as nick the gorgeous instrument she's built her career on. Weaving artfully as ever around the contours of songs that suggest the worst--Lennox is world-wise and therefore maybe inevitably world-weary--she imparts gravity and grace in a voice as cloudless and surface-smooth as just-brewed mint tea; from the tentative beginnings of the mournful "Dark Road" to the gospel-bottomed gorgeousness of "Ghosts in My Machine," she's in full command of her considerable vocal powers. And it's possible she's never used them to such moving effect on a single record. Earlier Lennox or Eurythmics albums might have succumbed here and there to slight-seeming experiments in style, but Songs of Mass Destruction doesn't dilly-dally. All swerves, even playful ones (see "Love Is Blind" and "Coloured Bedspread," a synth-y song that wouldn't seem so out of place on a recent Madonna record), are on-message: "Womankind" busts wide open not only because it needs to (a voice this big can't be contained, it reminds us), but to demo empowerment, and the hopeful "Sing" signs off with a seconds-long African guest vocal. There's an upside to the destruction of cultural wellness that led Lennox to write this record, and it's artistic creation. Songs of Mass Destruction is a sterling, rock-solid, expert example.

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Rolling Stone:
Songs Of Mass Destruction ***

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Rolling Stone USA:
Songs Of Mass Destruction***1/2

Anthony DeCurtis
Oct 4, 2007

The title is overstated, but Songs of Mass Destruction does layer welcome muscle beneath the porcelain-smooth surface of Annie Lennox's voice. The result is an album that captures the range of her styles, from the rhythmically charged pop of her Eurythmics days to the haunted, longing ballads of her solo career. If the two approaches don't always cohere, each is satisfying in its own right.

The album was produced by Glen Ballard, who is best known for his work with Alanis Morissette and the Dave Matthews Band. He roughens up Lennox's sound -- as on "Ghosts in My Machine," which rides an irresistible, staccato synth riff. "Womankind" is a self-esteem booster, while "Sing" gathers a coterie of female vocalists -- including Madonna, Dido and Joss Stone -- to raise awareness about mother-child HIV transmission in Africa. That the song doesn't collapse under its good intentions is a tribute to its sturdy pop craft -- a virtue in more than ample supply on this sparkling album.

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Blender:
Songs Of Mass Destruction

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Scotland on Sunday:
Songs Of Mass Destruction ****

It has been 15 years since her first solo record, Diva, and with due respect to the two albums since, Medusa and Bare, this sounds like the real follow-up to that multi-million seller.

Lennox's voice has lost none of its feline edge, and her artistic pulling power remains similarly undiminished.

'Sing' features 23 of today's most successful female artists in a slight return to 'Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves', an ensemble well enough handled by Jagged Little Pill producer Glen Ballard, but Lennox remains most impressive in her rightful place apart from the crowd.

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Boston Herald: The edge:
Songs Of Mass Destruction

Christopher John Treacy
B-

THIS turns out to be a fairly appropriate title for this collection of tunes. Like little cluster bombs, each of these tracks comes power-packed with a devastating emotional charge, with Lennox’s crystal-clear vocals merely adding to the impact.

Despite some top-notch songwriting and inspired singing, Lennox’s fourth solo outing is uneven. Glen Ballard’s production bathes the former Eurythmics siren in atmospherics that lack purpose. Hearing her tackle the tricky melody of “Through the Glass Darkly” and work retro-funky magic through “Coloured Bedspread” makes you wish she’d pushed for edgier treatments; the unexceptional “Ghosts In My Machine” sounds like filler.

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Sunday Express:
Songs Of Mass Destruction

Marcus Dunk
****

This is raw, beautiful and brutal stuff, wrapped up in soaring melodies and sweet harmony.

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Newsday:
Songs Of Mass Destruction - Grade A

Glenn Gamboa
October 2, 2007

Her gorgeous voice radiates elegance and melancholy and defiance, regardless of its surroundings. And on her latest album, "Songs of Mass Destruction" (RCA), she applies that voice to hearts broken by relationships, by warfare and by unnecessary suffering.

Lennox is still most effective alone at her piano - her unforgettably wrenching performance of "Why?" at Live 8 is a prime example - and that hasn't changed. "Lost," which Lennox takes from a quiet hum to the upper reaches of her range, is touchingly simple. And "Smithereens" will join the ranks of great Lennox ballads, with its Beatlesque swells and soulful vocal flourishes, as she declares "Everybody has a broken heart."

For "Songs of Mass Destruction," though, she also tries to balance the ballads with upbeat numbers. She rocks out a bit on "Love Is Blind." She hits the clubs for "Coloured Bedspread." She combines soul, world beat and a bit of hip-hop on the future anthem "Womankind." And she creates her own "We Are the World" moment, uniting the likes of Madonna, Pink, Shakira and 20 other female stars on "Sing," which will benefit Treatment Action Campaign, which raises funds to treat and educate those with AIDS in South Africa.

Lennox makes it seem so effortless to sweep listeners up in her wondrous vocals that it's easy to forget how hard it is to craft songs this well. Of course, that's the mark of a true master at the top of her game, where Lennox clearly works these days.

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Times Online:
Songs of Mass Destruction

Martin Aston
September 29, 2007
*** out of five

“I feel closer to my cutting edge now than ever before,” says Lennox, four years since her last album, though she is not about to embark on an album of folktronica, more’s the pity.

The ballads (especially Fingernail Moon) pack an emotional heft, with Lennox’s voice rich with age and world weariness. Through a Glass Darkly is a warm, treacly balm, while the synth-driven Coloured Bedspread recalls the Eurythmics. It’s just a shame about the faux-soul, glossy pop tracks such as Womankind, whose mid-song guest rap sounds uncomfortably like a concession to crossover appeal. But at least the album title, and more than half of the songs, are anything but a middle-aged cop-out.

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Times Online:
Annie Lennox's passion play

Alan Franks

October 6, 2007

Can a pop singer make the world a better place? Annie Lennox still believes so

After an intense conversation with Annie Lennox, I am convinced I know why she does the things she does. If that sounds presumptuous, I can only say that rock music has always provoked bold, bald statements. First, she has suffered from bouts of depression since she was 14 in her home town of Aberdeen; secondly, her father and grandfather were trade unionists of the old school, committed to improving the lot of the underdog.

“Many people,” she says, “have a fairly s****y life.” She is not trying to include herself in the category, although she has had her moments. “I love people who have principles and stick by them.” Again, she doesn’t claim to be of their number, only to want to “put the ideals that I have into some kind of symmetry with what I do for a living”.

Now 52, she says these things with the same fervour she has brought to her singing these past 30 years with the Eurythmics and as a soloist. Regularly called the greatest white soul singer alive, she is a musical counterpart to the conviction politician. As a result of this, not to mention her feminism and her striking androgyny, some regard her as scary, whereas the truth is surely that she is passionate.

“If I were just promoting my records,” she goes on, “I would be disgusted with myself.” As with the delivery of the songs – Would I Lie to You? springs to mind – she dares you to doubt her. Still, there is no getting around the fact that she is releasing a new album called Songs of Mass Destruction. It contains several moving compositions that come from this rueful vision of hers. Last month she headlined an Albert Hall concert for Peace One Day, the organisation behind the UN’s adoption of September 21 as a fixed date in the calendar for conflicts to be suspended. Her half-hour set, which included the new single, Dark Road, had a blistering honesty about it, and an absence of ego that seemed appropriate to the occasion. On that showing, it would be hard to argue with her own assessment that her voice is in its prime and that she is “closer to my cutting edge than ever before”.

Lennox’s involvement with this organisation started several years ago when she attended an event it had put on at Brixton Academy and was asked to read out a speech written by the Dalai Lama. When she talks about this and her other great involvement, with the South African Aids activists’ group TAC (Treatment Action Campaign), she does so with an energy that leaves you in no doubt that these callings are as urgent to her as was her teenage music vocation. She recalls her sense of awe at seeing Nelson Mandela standing outside his old cell on Robben Island rejoicing in the defeat of apartheid but warning of the greater struggle against the “genocide” of Aids.

Aids has now become for her not only a cause to be helped financially, but a theme of her songwriting. On Songs of Mass Destruction there is one called Sing, which incorporates a track by the TAC members group called the Generics. As message songs go, it carries a highly specific one, calling for the national implementation of a programme to prevent HIV transmission from mothers to babies. Lennox contacted 23 female singers of global renown, asking them to join her on the recording; hence the presence of Madonna, Céline Dion, kd lang, Beverley Knight, Sarah McLachlan, Shakira, KT Tunstall, Martha Wainwright, Bonnie Raitt, Joss Stone, Gladys Knight and others.

The idea is to put the track on the internet, with the profits from downloads sent to support TAC initiatives. You could see this as a practical enactment of the Eurythmics’ 1985 hit with Aretha Franklin, Sisters are Doin’ it for Themselves; whatever else it is, or does, it is a huge feminist anthem, with the endorsement of the ultimate girls’ superchoir.

“I can’t understand why it [feminism] has become such a scurvy word,” says Lennox. “I find that odd. I think people are a little scared to use it. I’m not. I’m saying it loud and strong. When I go to poor countries and see women labouring in the fields, carrying loads on their back as well as children, I think that what they need is empowerment. You can be a man and a feminist, too. It’s just about social and political rights. Until women finally get a better deal, we need feminism.

“Something happened, around the 1980s, when women started to become ashamed. Maybe there were a few too many brazen hussies, and maybe that was a bit of a turn-off, I don’t know. But you have to remember that women died for the vote and we still don’t have equal rights. Many men are quite threatened, I know, by the new phenomenon of women. I understand that; the male ego can be a frail thing – so too can the female, actually – and here are women getting top jobs. On a personal level it must be threatening.”

She has a top job. Is she threatening to men?

“Yes, I think so. Although never at all intentionally.”

But she is ballsy, as a performer. That is generally meant, as here, as a compliment.

“I take it as one . . . I really do have this intensity and energy, I know. I can’t help it, it’s just who I am. Seriously, I often have the sense that I should dampen it down to accommodate certain men.”

Not that there is a particular one in her life at present. She has been married twice, the first time very briefly to Radha Raman, a Hare Krishna monk, in the mid1980s; the second time, between 1988 and 2000, to the film producer Uri Fruchtmann, the father of her two teenage daughters, Lola and Tali. Her present singleness appears to suit her.

“It is probably better for me,” she agrees. “To be honest, I think relationships can be too difficult, very complicated. There is a part of me that thinks I could fare better in a close relationship with a man, but then, as I say, it all gets too complicated. It hasn’t panned out. It never did.”

But she gets on with her exes? “I have to sidestep that one because it’s too tricky. I’m sorry.”

She must be doing something right; she looks terrific, less gaunt than a few years ago, with a voice that sounds more flexible, broader and more relaxed than in her early years after she had left the Royal Academy of Music in London (where she studied the flute.)

She says her life has all been “a bit of a rollercoaster”, and that she is trying to smooth it out. It “feels big and extraordinary” when she is away singing, but she gets “heartsick” for her daughters and longs to be back in the smallness and sanity of Crouch End in North London.

And the depression? “Here’s the deal. It’s insidious. You can’t put your finger on it. You feel dreadful and you think there should be a reason. Stephen Fry [in his recent TV programme on the subject] described it very well when he got out of the car, in Aberdeen actually, saying: ‘I just feel dreadful.’ He described it and I knew exactly how he felt.” And it wasn’t because of Aberdeen? “On that I shall remain schtum.”

But not on Amy Winehouse, the troubled young singer who has some claim to being the next rock diva. “Oh, I think Amy has been given an incredible voice and writing skills. I saw her at the Cobden Club (in north Kensington) when she was 18, and I was completely blown away. She was like a woman in her thirties, with a whole, seasoned delivery, not fazed by anything at all. I was in awe of her. I thought, wow, you have a special talent. God, you are 18, where did that come from? I am very concerned for her. She could just destruct. There is some issue that desperately needs to be handled. When I talk about Amy, I think, there but for the grace of God. Not with drugs or drink. I think I have other issues.”

The depression? “Yes.” But then she also has a range of strategies, which includes her friends, her family, the music and the purposes she puts it to. She also has that not too common British attribute of pure, ardent exuberance at the heart of her. This may sound like a contradiction of the depression but it is in fact a travelling companion, the sort which reminds her that, having come so far, there’s no backing down now. The stakes have become too high.

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All Music Guide:
Songs Of Mass Destruction

**** out of Five
Review by Thom Jurek

Four albums in 15 years is not exactly prolific when it comes to making records. But Annie Lennox has never been one to rush things, and her recorded output as a solo artist in life after the Eurythmics has been stellar. The last time she issued a recording in 2003 with Bare, a collection of deeply committed emotional songs that set a new standard for her artistically, though they were written in the turmoil following her second divorce. Perhaps the reason she hasn't had the time to record is her activism. She's involved herself in causes that range from her primary concern, raising awareness about AIDS/HIV (and she refers to this in the album's notes), to the environment and poverty. But Songs of Mass Destruction isn't a political album by any means, unless the personal is — and often it is.

This is another album of love songs; dark love songs. These are breakup ballads, statuesque embers of pain and rage that have simmered down to the traces of that dull ache of emptiness that always exists in the aftermath of something profound. The production is characteristically slick, and Lennox is in excellent voice — it's always startling to hear something new from her simply because that voice is so singular, it becomes a part of the listener no matter what she's signing. Most of what's here is adult-oriented, sophisticated pop. That's nothing to apologize for. The keyboard- and drum-drenched set has all sorts of texture to keep it from being formulaic, such as the accordion on "Ghost in My Machine," which is a rocking number. "Love Is Blind" begins with an acoustic piano and a slide guitar quietly rumbling behind it, though it's a suicide ballad turned inside out. When Lennox opens her mouth, it's all blues scorch wither, letting that big voice wrap itself around some harrowing lines like "I got so much trouble getting in to this/Can't decide if it's hell or bliss/Sometimes I feel like I don't exist/Cut my veins and slit my wrists/Goodbye/Goodbye...Can't you see that I'm so addicted/To the notion of a someone/Who could take me from this wretched state/Save me from the bitterness and hatred of humanity/I'm so screwed up." But she's not pleading; she's declaring, testifying with searing honesty.

On the track "Sing," she has donated all proceeds to an AIDS charity TAC (Treatment Action Committee) and enlisted a host of women to sing in a choir who will likely not be heard in the same place again: Beth Gibbons, Madonna, Celine Dion, Beth Orton, Angélique Kidjo, Shakira, Sarah McLachlan, Faith Hill, Fergie, Beverley Knight, Martha Wainwright, k.d. lang, Shingai Shoniwa, KT Tunstall, Bonnie Raitt, Dido, Gladys Knight, Anastacia, and Melissa Etheridge. It's another huge feminist anthem, with a killer hook, a big bad soul/gospel refrain, and a beat that, once it gets into the spine, will not be easily dismissed. But the ballads here are as profound and deep as the big production numbers.

The opener, with its lilting Celtic flavor, is devastatingly beautiful and sad. "Smithereens," with its languid piano treading so lightly, offers the singer once more bearing heart and soul in a kind of vulnerability that accepts responsibility as well as lays blame: "Behind the victim/Behind the trouble/Of all the things you've not expressed...So don't make me sad/I couldn't stand to watch you fall/'Cause everybody has a tender heart/Remember this/I didn't mean to break it down to smithereens." "Womankind" is a funky soul number offering wishes that perhaps many women wish for (though men do too), though its expression of raw need and desire may piss off a few of its intended recipients. The track is a bona fide single, though. It's colored by the exotic ballad "Through a Glass Darkly," looking through the mirror of life in the true self, with its cyclical coming together and splitting apart, which is realized utterly in "Lost." "Coloured Bedspread" revisits the electronic beat pop of the Eurythmics.

The skeletal toy-sounding piano and cheap drum machine in "Big Sky" is lifted by the power of Lennox's voice and her backing vocalists before it breaks into big fat warm loops, and Lennox digging deep into her soul book for the melody. Anita Baker, eat your heart out. The set closes with the elegant, complex, and confident ballad "Fingernail Moon," which is sung alone in the emptiness of the night sky, bearing the entirety of disappointment, the smallness of humanity in the universe — no matter how much we think we're the center of it. The sadness in the song is also confessional and speaks to bewilderment and ultimately becomes a prayer when she sings, "I feel so sad/There's something unsettling under my skin/I don't know the reason or where to begin/Caught in the circles I've found myself in/But I want to reach out and touch you/My sweet sickle moon."

Songs of Mass Destruction can be heard as a melancholy part two of Bare, but one feels after repeated listening that Lennox is not only speaking of her own experiences in life and love, but those of her sisters, and the human condition at large, when focused on in the first person, becomes somewhat palatable and embraceable by a third party. It's as gorgeous a collection as Bare, and pop music should be so lucky as to have more of this kind of thing out in the world. She may not be prolific, but she is always profound, and to date has always delivered the very best she's had to offer, which is, in this case, as well as her other recordings, plentiful and magnificent.

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HX Magazine:
Party drugs, STDs and world peace … just a regular conversation with original diva Annie Lennox

By Trenton Straube

Ready for a roller-coaster ride? That's what Annie Lennox likens her music to, and her new solo disc, Songs of Mass Destruction, is certainly a dramatic journey of extreme emotions—as is this interview with the surprisingly sassy songstress. But when discussing her work, she's a serious artiste: "Each track has a different feel," Annie says of the album that veers from atmospheric songs of loss to anthemic calls for hope. She's also serious about her passionate for human rights —her disc's title references the Iraq war—and when we caught up with Annie, she had just performed in London for Peace One Day, a movement to make September 21 the day of world peace. "But it doesn't have to be about putting weapons down," she says. "You can make friends with someone you haven't spoken with—whatever it means to you." What? Make peace with our ex- boyfriends? Now that really would change the world.

HX: After hearing the haunting debut single "Dark Road" and reading about the disc's serious subject matter, listeners might not be prepared for the upbeat, anthemic sound on many tracks. How do you meld the two?

Annie Lennox: Seamlessly, dear! The music comes intuitively. I don't try to figure it out. And as human beings, we are paradoxical, the two things co-exist: darkness and light, positive and negative. You can't get one without the other. I've always been a person with a dark side, but I do try to be positive.

Yet another sample of "Sweet Dreams" has surfaced, this time in Britney Spears's "Everybody." You've covered other artist's songs, but how do you feel about your work being covered and sampled?

Well, most of the time I don't mind, but frankly, I think a lot of it's pretty lame.

Bloggers followed the recent "news" about your teenage daughter Lola's party being overrun with hooligans who trashed your home. How did everything turn out? Is Lola sooo grounded until she's 50?

The whole thing was grossly exaggerated and reinvented. The party wasn't even held at my house to begin with. There was no bill of damage to pay, because there was no damage done. The paper got hold of a story and they spun it out, basically. Sorry to disappoint. But that's the boring old truth. I'm not going to recap on it because it's nobody's business. What kind of adjectives could I use to describe it? Pathetic, ridiculous, invasive, laughable, prurient, pointless. That'll do.

As a mother, do you see your daughters going through the same things you went through, or do you think being young today is a totally different experience?

Young people are going through all the things that young people have always gone through. But the times are always changin'. It's a completely different planet than mine 40 years ago. Cell phones, Internet, media, fashion, information, consumerism, celebrity, affluence, air travel, etc. etc. Besides, we tend to forget that the world is split in two: those that have, and those that don't. In many places children don't even make their fifth birthday and life expectancy is around 38 years. It's a little sobering when you consider the prevalent cultural obsession with bullshit celebrity.

The new album and the video for "Dark Road" explore that political and economic rift in today's world. You've said that on the new album cover, you symbolize a priestess rising from the destruction.

I had the imagery established in my mind well before we went to the studio. I wanted to stand in front of an apocalyptical sky because every day I'm seeing images of destruction. Some bombing here, some building that has been blitzed, some body parts lying around. When I say "Songs of Mass Destruction," it isn't only in Iraq. The globe itself is almost at a tipping point. Now is a time to question political leaders and find ways to save the planet.

You amassed an entire choir of world-famous divas to help out on "Sing." In fact, I get a strong feminist vibe on the disc. Is that a fair assessment? Have you had it with men?

To me, the word feminism means social, political and personal empowerment. Despite the fact that Western women seem to have become so blase about the subject, there are still millions of women across the globe who are in desperate need of it. Empowerment is not a given. Women struggled and fought before us to secure the vote and equal rights. We owe them some acknowledgement for what we've received because of their efforts. As for the men—I still haven't figured it out. Enough said.

You just launched a new web site. I'm curious: Do you use the Internet to connect to your fans and other people? Do you actually blog on your MySpace page and annielennox.com?

Yes, I do actually. No one seems to believe it, but I think it adds a brilliant new dimension to communicating with people directly, without any middle man, so to speak. And due to freedom of speech, I can say exactly what I want. And I love getting that kind of feedback. I think that these kinds of networks have so much potential for positive social and political—with a small "p"—evolution. That's what I'm about essentially.

Back to the album: Some tracks give me the impression of someone who has been pushed too far for the last time, someone on an extreme edge. Would it be a mistake to assume you're writing from personal experiences?

Darlin', I've been through pretty much everything. Let me put it to you like that. But having said that, I have to say that the songs are non-specific … just like STDs.

STDs!?! I'm sure I wouldn't know anything about that, but speaking of which—God, this is a terrible segue—the gays have always loved you. Can you elaborate on that relationship?

Gay men relate to me because they want to be me, stupid! Just kiddin'! I wish that people wouldn't have to make their sexual orientation the entire center of their existence. I don't think too much about which side of the fence people are on. I just know whether I feel connected to them. A lot of the time, I still feel pretty alienated from the herd. I keep myself to myself mostly.

One last subject: dance mixes. You music has always been a staple on the dance floor. And you have remixes already slated for the single "Sing." You said you collaborate with art directors. Do you also work with the DJs and producers on the remixes?

I'm going to be brutally honest here. I find a lot of it totally vacuous. People say you've got to have taken a lot of drugs before you "get it." I'm pretty sure that you have to take a lot of drugs. What kind of drugs are you gay guys taking? Wait! Don't answer that! Please don't!

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The Indipendent Sunday:
Songs of Mass Destruction

Reviewed by Andy Gill

For her fourth solo outing, Annie Lennox has ditched her usual producer, Stephen Lipson, in favour of Glen Ballard, the American best known for inflicting Alanis Morissette upon the world. While there's no denying the power and command of Lennox's vocals throughout, it's not a particularly fruitful alliance, Ballard's bland sound denuding the songs of impact. Alarm bells really start ringing two-thirds of the way through, when one realises that "Coloured Bedspread" is just about the most enjoyable thing here, precisely because its understated Eighties electro-funk so closely resembles her work in Eurythmics. The rest of the album vacillates between sludgy power ballads, such as "Smithereens" and "Lost", and Elton-esque MOR rockers, such as "Love is Blind". The Aids-benefit anthem "Sing" struggles to make much impression despite a choir comprised of virtually every popular female singer in the Western world, and a few from beyond. Lennox's greatest failing throughout Songs of Mass Destruction is her too-eager recourse to lyrical cliché, a parade of banalities every bit as clunky as that title.

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CalendarLive.com:
Purging bitterness with an army of Annies

Mary Gauthier
* * *

On her first album in four years, Annie Lennox is on the prowl for deliverance -- from isolation, from "the same old madness," from bitterness and hatred, from the scourge of AIDS.

That's good news for fans of the demigod of divas, because her quest has resulted in a return of the fiery, gospel-rooted rave-up to her repertoire after its near-absence on 2003's "Bare." The emotional darkness that yielded that album's deliberate introspection is even more intense now, but this time she's out to purge it in classic churchy tradition, with some foot-stomping, hands-in-the-air call and response with a vocal chorus.

This being Lennox, who's always liked to mix the earthy with the experimental, all those voices are her own, an army of Annies clustering into vast choirs and wailing and bantering with their leader.

If you want to record gospel with grit, you hire a Ry Cooder or a Kirk Franklin to produce. Lennox has pop-rock maestro Glen Ballard, who marshals her voices into a cyber-soul chorale. The sleekness doesn't diminish the fervor or the fun.

Still, it's big, adult-contemporary ballads that ground "Songs of Mass Destruction" (coming out Tuesday), and although Lennox (who wrote all the songs) can entice with the honeyed tones and focused self-evaluation of the opening "Dark Road," others, including "Big Sky," "Through the Glass Darkly" and "Fingernail Moon," don't really come to life.

The one chorus that isn't all Annie is "Sing," a "We Are the World"-style gathering aimed at the African AIDS crisis. The 23 singers include Madonna, Céline Dion, Shakira, Joss Stone, Fergie and Faith Hill.

The recording doesn't have the personality that the lineup might suggest, but one thing is clear: When this diva calls, it's a good idea to respond.

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Living Scotsman:
Annie forgets her guns

Fiona Shepherd
28 September 2007

FOR many years now, Annie Lennox has been pop royalty. Distinguished, remote, even untouchable, she moves with ease among a peer group which includes some of the most powerful world figures, and is one of the privileged few artists who seem able to command some fascination and an implicit respect regardless of her artistic output. This is just as well, as Songs of Mass Destruction is only her fourth solo album in 15 years.

In recent times, she has enjoyed a higher profile for her humanitarian campaigning than for her music. If a little celebrity chest-beating is required at your international event, Annie Lennox must be top of your special guest wish list - she's always on hand for the awareness-raising photocall or to provide the oppressively meaningful soundtrack at some eminent public gathering.

Personally, I have no problem with pop stars allying themselves with worthy causes. What is frustrating about Lennox is that this articulate spokeswoman on various global issues does not channel that same eloquence into her music. Despite its Iraq war-referencing title, Songs of Mass Destruction preserves rather than challenges her musical status quo. Judging by its conservative content, it won't be laying waste to anyone's ears any time soon.

Much of the album is just aural wallpaper, with little colour to the arrangements. Dark Road, Smithereens and Through the Glass Darkly are all corporate plodders, defeated by production which irons out all the interesting blemishes. Attention is thrown instead on to Lennox's pristine voice, which sounds as capable as ever. If her singing strikes a chord for you emotionally, you'll have nothing to complain about here, as she adopts her usual musical default position of unchallenging adult-orientated pop.

This approach may stray into dullness, but at least it is comfortable. When she tries to rock and raunch things up, as on Love is Blind, a plea to rekindle a one-sided love affair, or Ghosts in my Machine, a broke-down blues piece with clichéd rock'n'roll lyrics worthy of Primal Scream, she just sounds like a classy bird not quite succeeding in getting her hands dirty.

Womenkind superficially sounds like it could be another of her shouts out to the sisters, but on this occasion she's not interested in singing about doing it for herself. Instead, she's advertising for a man, with some toothless assistance from rapper Nadirah X. Coloured Bedspread succeeds in generating a bit more atmosphere with its retro electronica feel, marking a return of sorts to the sound of early Eurythmics, although actually it's no more sultry or cutting edge than your average Erasure track.

For all Lennox's committed activism, she generally sticks to personal emotional territory on this album. Sing is the exception, and a potentially interesting one at that. It is obviously the track Lennox cares about most passionately, as it was inspired by her work with Nelson Mandela's 46664 charity and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), both organisations lobbying for better education and health care for those affected by AIDS.

In order to publicise the cause, she has enlisted the singing services of 23 of her most successful female contemporaries, including Madonna, kd lang, Celine Dion and her old buddy Aretha Franklin - not that you would necessarily appreciate the star quotient from the track, on which most of her guest vocalists are relegated to the role of backing singers. Madge muscles in on a verse, Franklin breaks through with sheer lung power and that might be Joss Stone twittering away as cluelessly as usual in the background.

Although you can't fault the sentiments and initiatives which inspired the song - nor the vital funds it will raise through its download sales - musically it belongs to the Live Aid era of broad anthemic statements, which never really hit the mark unless they are being performed in a stadium with a charged atmosphere. There is actually more soul in the brief run-out groove featuring the unvarnished vocals of The Generics, a group comprising African TAC activists.

Lennox returns to more personal themes at the end of the album, shaking her fist at the heavens on Big Sky, then mellowing her stance on the more poetic yet still questioning Fingernail Moon, on which she displays more lyrical vulnerability than the rest of the album put together. However, again the music plays it safe, never approaching the raw emotion which would make these lyrics come alive. It would be disrespectful to deny her these feelings - and it's probably treason to disrespect Annie Lennox - but she does tend to make emotional turmoil sound very boring.

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LIVING SCOTSMAN:
Love and anger

Paul Lester

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT ANNIE Lennox couldn't get any darker - her last collection, 2003's Bare, featured such knees-up happy-hour classics as The Hurting Time, Bitter Pill, Loneliness, Twisted and The Saddest Song I've Got - she goes and records an album called Songs of Mass Destruction.

But whereas her last album was a deeply personal and emotional affair that saw her "facing up to the failed expectations of life", her latest work, only her fourth solo release in 15 years, has a rather more global aspect. If Bare found her looking inwards, exorcising the demons from her two marriages, on Songs of Mass Destruction, Lennox, 52, raises her gaze to take a long, hard look at the state of the planet. This time, the "destruction" isn't just what happens behind closed doors chez Lennox; it's the havoc being wreaked in the wider world.

"Actually, it's a mixture of the two things," she says of her CD. "Because there are two universes that one traverses. One is the external world, which I think is utterly mad, and the other is your own internal planet." Lennox distinguishes between personal challenges - as she puts it, "illness, death, bankruptcy, failure and dreams that one aspires to that are never fulfilled, because no-one comes out of this unscathed" - and the global issues we're being forced to confront.

"This excuse for America and Great Britain to enter into Iraq gave me the title Songs of Mass Destruction," she explains. "When this war started, I thought to myself, 'This is very extreme.' Going into another country like this: to do what? Oh, liberate the Iraqi people. Well, that's very interesting. Did they ask for these two countries to liberate them? No, they didn't. So the cowboys were going to go and find Bin Laden in the caves of Afghanistan. I thought, 'Something smells really bad here.' It was just a lie, a cynical piece of political spin to confuse the public. Now all those people that voted Labour, me included, I'm wondering how they're feeling today. And I'm also wondering how, quite frankly, Tony Blair sleeps at night. So [on the album] I'm feeling that no way can you trust politicians. Who do I trust? Me."

Anyone who imagines that Lennox, 30 years after she formed her first band The Tourists with Dave Stewart and two decades since her heyday with Eurythmics, might have mellowed should spend an hour or so in her company. Those 79 million album sales she's enjoyed have done little to dampen her essentially fiery spirit.

She's recently been in South Africa, visiting clinics and orphanages for the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) against what she calls "the invisible genocide" that is AIDS. There she saw a seven-year-old girl who "weighs the same as a one-year-old child and is a virtual skeleton" and spent time with Nelson Mandela. Suddenly, the music business and its attendant cult of personality seemed more redundant to Lennox than ever.

"All the doctors over there, the NGOs, the members of Médecins Sans Frontières and people on the front line - nobody's giving them front pages of the daily tabloid newspapers. And I think that stinks. Because we're so infatuated by Paris Hilton, or whoever's pathetic life, going to prison. I don't mean to identify one 'celeb' or point a finger at that one individual. It's just this obsession with things that are so dumbed-down; it's a brainwashing that we're all party to in this weird state of saturation of information. Where's our social conscience, the bit where we go, 'Hang on a minute: half the world doesn't eat'? You know, half the children of the world have got some kind of disease, which could have been prevented if their drinking water was clean, but they can't get clean drinking water, they can't get food. We're off-kilter completely."

For Lennox, the idea that rock'n'roll should be fuelled by the negative, by degeneracy and nihilism, is completely outmoded.

"I don't buy into that anymore. It’s bullshit. And I've always suspected that. I'm not interested in teenage angst; it does very little for me now." She laughs. "I'm only interested in my own angst. I have to sort that out. I think everybody has a touch of teenage angst, even in their fifties. It's part of who you are. F***ing hell, though, God bless Pete Doherty, but do I give a shit? I don't. I'm not getting at Pete Doherty, per se. What I'm getting at is people's obsession with that. I don't understand why we're so obsessed with his blood-spraying antics. Who cares? I go to places in the world and I see a million people living without sanitation, without proper medical healthcare... I'm sorry; I'm on my soapbox here. But I just don't understand why we're so obsessed with all that shit."

Not that she's some new puritan assuming the moral high ground while all below her is decadence and decay. "Don't get me wrong," she says. "I love shopping. I love Heat and Hello! I mean, I don't buy them, but I read them. I understand that vicarious pleasure. And also that thing about checking people out. Of course, it's just tittle-tattle. I'm not being über moralistic. But we need to have a balance. We've got so much potential, may God strike me down for saying so."

Lennox has been doing her bit to redress the balance away from vacuous indulgence. On Songs of Mass Destruction, for example, there is a song called Sing which she wrote "as an anthem focusing on the mother-to-child HIV transmission-prevention program". She enlisted the help of 23 of the most stellar female names in pop, from Madonna, Joss Stone and Shakira to Aretha Franklin, KD Lang and Celine Dion, who each contribute a vocal, Band Aid style. She intends to make the track available on the net, with profits from downloads going to support TAC initiatives.

"I thought, by nature of the fact that my gender is female, I will contact other successful, internationally known female artists and make a kind of posse, if you like, of women, who are making a stand for women that don't have a voice," she explains. "It's a fantastic list of women. Even if nobody plays the song or it's not a hit, it doesn't matter. Because it's an interesting event, to get all these people together. And I'm using it as a political statement, a little platform, really, for social change." But Lennox is under no illusions that a single track, or performer, can change the world. She may have been touched by the idealism of the 1960s and spurred into musical action by the radicalism of the 1970s, but she's no head-in-the-sand optimist. She's a pragmatist.

"I'm not the Dutch boy with my finger in the dam," she says. "I'm not going to stop the tide. Life is what it is, full of things that I despise or think are wrong for me and the world in general. My answer to that is to be proactive in my own life, in my own sphere of influence. I just wake up every day and try to make sense of the world. I don't have any answers. All my songs are about my own kind of questioning, and sense of paradox. Because I do find the world a beautiful, extraordinary place. But at the same time, I realise that it's monstrous. I know what pain is. My own subjective pain, I know what that feels like; emotional pain. In a nutshell: death, illness, divorce, loss, change, unfulfilled dreams... But hey! What's new?"

Does she revel in the misery, in any sense, especially on the new album, on songs such as Dark Road, Smithereens and Through the Glass Darkly? "In a way, there's pleasure in the expression of something dark. I do wrestle with darkness, which has accompanied me all my life. And I would say that maybe the music is the transcendence through it in some way."

She remembers the first time she managed to express these dark feelings, when she was at school, and tears fill her eyes.

"The very first time I ever wrote a poem, I was sitting in an English class. The teacher said, 'I want you all to write a poem about violence.' I wrote one in about eight minutes: 'Bam!' And it felt really good. It was a statement, and I was exorcising, in a way, something. I was only about 12 and it felt very good. I got goosebumps. I remember, like, 'Whoa! Something's happened.' And I think that, whenever I write, something happens for me."

In these difficult times, apart from songwriting, she seeks solace in Buddhist philosophy. "I'm not Buddhist, but I do like the comfort in that it tells you, 'Everything is impermanent.' We don't like change. But the truth is, everything is unstable. That is utterly terrifying."

Doesn't material wealth provide secu-rity? "Why do you assume that? I've experienced rejections... You don't know my world." But on a purely financial level ... ? "That's comfort, that's not security. Money can poison relationships. Money brings comfort, without a doubt. But it also brings responsibility. Because what are you going to do with it? How are you going to teach your kids the values of life? I come from a working-class background; no-one gave me a penny. And I haven't had to kill vast amounts of people or exploit the arses off of them to have money in the bank."

With her shock of blonde hair, angular features and wiry frame, she's still instantly recognisable. Do people accost her on the street? "Yes, from time to time. But they're generally extremely nice with me; very respectful, really sweet, very complimentary. They're still surprised, because they still think of me with an orange crew-cut."

On Songs of Mass Destruction she has, she believes, "found a new cutting edge" for herself. "I'm 52, and I started singing properly when I was about 22. And I didn't realise I could be going even stronger in 30 years' time. You'd have thought that I'd be on the scrap heap. But I don't feel like that. I feel more empowered. I've earned my stripes, do you know what I mean? Because there's always that self-doubt. Most artists are quite critical of themselves; they don't go round thinking they're great."

In her videos, especially with Eurythmics, she always exuded icy invulnerability. But appearances are deceptive. "I did struggle with things like stage fright," she says. "It's horrible because it's like an adrenaline shift that comes up half an hour before you're due to perform. And you've got to overcome that, otherwise it makes it torturous when you're performing."

With her changes of style over the years and ability to adapt to changing fashions, is she a British Madonna or female Bowie? She seems offended. "No! I'm neither of those people. How could I be the British Madonna? Who's she? In what terms could I ever be the British Madonna? I'm just me."

She'd surely concede that she enjoys flitting between musical styles, particularly on Songs of Mass Destruction? Lennox seems happier with this notion. "There's a jazz element there, there's a folk element, then an electro thing, then a soul thing, then a Delta blues thing, then something to do with rock. I'm not one genre. It's like Kate Bush. You can't say, 'What kind of music does Kate Bush make?' She makes Kate Bush music."

Lennox describes Songs of Mass Destruction as "the phoenix rising out of the ashes" of Bare. "Some of it is dark, and some of it is light and hopeful and loving and unconditional. The human condition is that we struggle with that paradox. And that is the summarisation of my work. But eventually, light wins out." She realises she's just come up with a decent alternative title for the album: Light Wins Out.

"I just try to be a good person and not to let the dark win," she says. "It's hard, because I think the pull of darkness is pretty strong. You have to make an effort. It's like going to the gym: a psychic workout. It's dead easy to just go, 'F*** it. I'm going to stay in bed.'

"But you make the effort and, ultimately, you feel better. The key is not to go down. Because that is not a solution.

"So you have to find the way out of the hole, whichever hole it is."

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The Irish Times Magazine:
Anthem for Africa / Using her Voice

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Slant Magazine:
Songs of Mass Destruction

by Sal Cinquemani
September 27, 2007
*** out of five

Stephen Lipson, producer behind hits by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Grace Jones, has been Annie Lennox's collaborator of choice for over a decade, helping to make her solo debut, Diva, the mainstream equivalent of Massive Attack's Blue Lines, rendering her follow-up album of covers strikingly original, and even managing to turn her midlife depression, embodied by 2003's Bare, into something downright elegant. That Lennox would eventually break from the relationship isn't surprising (the pair's best work is probably behind them), but the decision to team with Glen Ballard for her fourth album, Songs of Mass Destruction, lends the proceedings a more American pop/rock sound that unfortunately mirrors the Eurythmics' mid-'80s shift from synth-pop and new wave to a more vanilla brand of rock. The conversion is less jarring here, as the more aggressive songs and Lennox's willingness to experiment (she even raps!) are refreshing following the beautiful but gloomy Bare (the singer, under the guise of a concept, couldn't even get herself out of bed long enough to shoot a video for that album).

Lennox's voice, capable of creating the illusion of an entire choir as it does on the gospel-y "Ghost in My Machine," is always the key focus of her music, which is why a more organic production approach sounds so good on paper. The problem is that Ballard has a tendency to over-produce, as evidenced by the ballad "Lost," in which Lennox literally gets lost in a wash of vocal overdubs. And then there's the matter of that album title—a peculiar choice for a record that isn't particularly political. "Womankind," referenced in at least three different songs, would have made more sense given the names of Lennox's previous releases, not to mention the album's feminist bent; even "Sing," a track recorded to raise awareness about mother-to-child HIV transmission in South Africa, smartly plays more like a broad-spectrum sisters-are-doin'-it-for-themselves anthem.

Mass Destruction is Lennox's first album largely recorded in the U.S. (Los Angeles and Miami, as opposed to just London), giving the songs a slightly less chilly quality and a bigger, more expansive sound, but it's still a disappointment in the same way the Eurythmics' rock-leaning Be Yourself Tonight likely was to fans of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) and Touch. "Coloured Bedspread" is a happy synth-pop surprise reminiscent of the duo's '80s heyday, but it's an Easter egg that belongs in an entirely different basket. Lennox could have taken the experimentation to lengths as heady and exhilarating as her gender-bending tricks during the '80s or her chameleonic music-video personas of the '90s by working with any number of forward-thinking producers (Jon Brion, Guy Sigsworth, or even someone like Moby, whose influence can be heard subtly on "Big Sky"). Then again, even though "Love is Blind" is driven by the same bouncy piano rhythm as many of her past hits, it's a tried and true formula that, like even the weakest of Lennox albums, never fails to satisfy.

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Metro (Italy):
Welcome back, lady of blues

By Paolo Zaccagnini on Metro, 28/09/07

It has waited years to come out, but Songs Of Mass Destruction, Annie Lennox's new album is an elegant, dramatic and committed piece of pop.
A beautiful 52 years old woman, Annie doesn't give up on soul influences (listen to Sing, featuring collaborations by Madonna, Anastacia, Shakira and Pink among the others), giving her best also at the piano.

Fighting against HIV with Nelson Mandela has enriched her writing and made even more precious her singing: the music flows, painful yet sparkling. Dark Road and Love Is Blind are simply thrilling.

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Billboard.com:
Home Studio May Help Lennox Work Quicker

September 27, 2007, 11:25 AM ET
Gary Graff, Detroit

It's been four years since Annie Lennox's last solo album, "Bare." But that's better than the eight-year gap between "Bare" and its predecessor, "Medusa."

"I'd like to be more prolific with my work," Lennox, who releases her fourth solo album, "Songs of Mass Destruction," on Oct. 2, tells Billboard.com. "I think perhaps in the future I will be more (prolific) -- perhaps as my home life changes, my children start to get a little older. I'm also going to have my own little studio near at hand, so, I think, the future's bright."

Lennox recorded "Songs of Mass Destruction" in Miami with producer Glenn Ballard, who she was introduced to by Eurythmics partner Dave Stewart. "I took us six weeks in all to record, and every day was a great pleasure," Lennox reports. "It was a long call, but it was pretty calculated. I was pretty sure it would work, and it certainly did."

The album's centerpiece is "Sing," which was inspired by Lennox's involvement in Nelson Mandela's 46664 and Treatment Action Campaign against AIDS. After writing the track, Lennox recruited 23 of her female colleagues -- including Madonna, Faith Hill, Celine Dion, Pink, Fergie and Bonnie Raitt -- to add backing vocals.

"I deliberately set out to write a song that could be an anthem," Lennox explains. "Because the incidence of HIV AIDS is on the rise for women, especially in the pandemic across the whole of the African continent, I thought perhaps I could be of benefit by writing a song and empowering those women who do not have an international voice."

"I thought that if I could invite other female artists to join with me, that would be a really strong statement," she continues. "So I sent out a lot of letters to various artists that I thought would be appropriate, and they all came back to me very positively. I'm so glad they've given me their voice and their endorsement of the issue."

Lennox begins a 16-show North American tour to promote "Songs of Mass Destruction" on Oct. 8 in San Diego.

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Billboard:
Songs Of Mass Destruction

As the title "Songs of Mass Destruction" implies, it's hardly tea time on Annie Lennox's fourth solo album in 15 years. She uses every delicate edge of her dusky, seductive voice to paint a world-weary portrait of dreams lost, love scattered, shivering cold. Opener/first single "Dark Road" and cloudy, meandering "Lost" are definitive, gorgeous servings of her dark brew. But Lennox is hardly giving in to defeat. "Ghosts of the Machine" is a soul-stomping anthem of defiance, insisting, "Set my spirit free," while "Womankind" issues a playful call for "the best thing that hasn't happened to me." There's no getting around the thematic pall, but Lennox surrounds every message with such beauty that one remains convinced it's all going to be OK.

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NYDailyNews.com:
Annie Lennox is filled with 'Destruction'

Sunday, September 30th 2007, 4:00 AM

Annie Lennox doesn't sound happy.

On her first album in four years, she starts out singing about the "Dark Road" she's on, bumpy with "the same old madness." At the CD's close, 10 tracks later, she traces the space between a lover and herself that measures as great a distance as between the Earth and the moon.

Warning: There's not much more uplift in the songs between.

"Most of us in the world are wounded," Lennox says. "It's very rare that a person has found an arrival point of peace and acceptance. We're scarred and pitted with all the experiences we've had that have been difficult. I am no exception."

Except, of course, in her ability to provide her own calming balm through the creamy sustenance of her voice. If anything, Lennox's tone, at 52, sounds more stalwart and maternally reassuring than ever. It's a balance she very much needs for an album deservedly titled "Songs of Mass Destruction."

The disk follows a CD that itself was no picnic. "Bare," in 2003, chronicled the collapse of Lennox's marriage to film producer Uri Fruchtmann, who fathered her two daughters. The disk didn't recoil from cataloguing every consequence of rejection. Lennox quibbles, however, with the notion that "Bare" was her "divorce album."

"It wasn't about the end of my marriage," she says. "That wouldn't have been very responsible to my children. It came about through those circumstances, which were very difficult." Her marriage, she says, was part of the album "only by proxy."

"Bare" became a pained experience for more reasons than its inspiration. Lennox started cutting it with one producer, who didn't work out, which forced her to scrap that effort and start all over again. Then her mother became gravely ill, and the singer wanted to spend more time with her.

That, along with raising her two young daughters, helps explain the 11-year gap between Lennox's first solo CD, the classic "Diva," and "Bare." The only disk that appeared in between (1995's "Medusa") was comprised entirely of cover songs.

Lennox, who worked more speedily with her hit band The Eurythmics in the '80s, doesn't regret the rarity of her solo work.

"What's the point in being prolific if you're not coming out with work of import?" she says. "Prince puts out albums every year. And to me, he's a genius, but you can get too much of a good thing."

For "Mass Destruction," Lennox broke some recording patterns. She didn't work with her usual producer (Steve Lipson) but teamed instead with Glen Ballard, best known for his work with Alanis Morissette. Lennox met Ballard through ex-Eurythmic group-mate Dave Stewart. The main change he brought was leaner instrumentation in the tracks and a lack of fuss around Lennox's voice. It's the clearest we've heard her singing since the Eurythmics days.

"Glen said to me, 'Your voice is the apex of the recording,'" Lennox recalls. "'We don't need any clutter around it.'"

Lennox's melodies make full use of her range. The tracks allow her voice to ride the tunes in long, rich arcs. "My voice is very resonant in the room," Lennox says. "I like to see how far it will go."

Not all the songs slump in the direction of despair. "Sing" salutes the valor of women. To make the point, Lennox