Even amid the supposed biggest stars in the recording industry, Annie Lennox stood out at the Grammys earlier this year, and performing the songs from last year’s ignored “Nostalgia” album on a new “Great Performances” (PBS, 10 p.m., check local listings), she turns standards that we thought we knew, inside out, creating new level of grandeur with power and poise.
A week before shooting this special at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles with a big orchestra, the striking former front woman for Eurythmics sang a handful of the same well-chosen songs with a small trio in a Pasadena hotel ballroom for TV critics — an unworthy bunch in general, but rarely so much as this.
The powerful reworking of “I Put a Spell on You” and “Georgia on My Mind” among others turned out to be a prelude for a longer chat about her inspirations and choices — and an emotional reaction to a Twitter trial by fire over her use of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”
Some of these songs, from Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, had been with her for a long time, she said.
“American music has traveled so widely,” Lennox said. “It even came to the northeast of Scotland in the 1960s. But for me, as a teenager, I was listening to Motown and Stax. We were dancing in the dancehalls to Stevie Wonder and The Foundations and The Four Tops and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the whole thing. And that came from Detroit, and it deeply influenced me, deeply affected me. So that aspect of hearing music in Scotland that was from a completely different culture has always been part of my identity.
“It’s so thrilling to think that I actually did get to hear the Beatles for the first time, you know, “She Loves You” and all of that and ‘Twist and Shout,’ and going through all those developments with them, the incredible sort of music that came out of England in the late ’60s. And I was really influenced by that hugely. And I think that just we carry the nostalgia, cultural, social, emotional, familial in our heads. And I think as you get older, you kind of realize more and more how much is going on there. You’re creating your own sort of narrative.
“There was we never had a lot of money growing up,” Lennox said. “So there wasn’t a big record collection or anything like that. It was the radio, and I heard stuff on a little transistor radio. When I was a teenager I would go dancing, and I’d hear it at the ballrooms, you know. And I do remember, though, that there was a beautiful little collection of black 78 records.
“And there was an old dance set record player somewhere in any grandmother’s house. There were songs like Al Jolson, you know, just weird stuff like bits of opera and just strange things that I discovered, and I would just lie on the floor, keep listening to this music. I’m an only child. I have the only child syndrome that you have to play at lot by yourself.”
The “Nostalgia” album began with that solitary approach as well, Lennox says. “It started very simply with me singing at the piano and transcribing the basis of the chords and the melodies and the nuances of the lyrics after that. And then we sort of built it up from there.”
She knew taking on songs like “God Bless the Child,” “Summertime” and “The Nearness of You” might “ruffle a few feathers perhaps.” But her motives were pure. “I just I fell in love with these songs.”
And she learned to appreciate jazz approaches. “Jazz is for singers,” she says. “It has so much nuance and so much inflection. And if it’s too mannered, it becomes, to me, sterile and static. It has to have this intuitive, spontaneous performance. So as a singer, it was wonderful because I imbibed the songs in a way. And I sat with the keyboard and just learned them, as you do with songs. They become your friends. You know, they start off as strangers if you don’t know them. And slowly, slowly, word by word, phrase by phrase, verse by verse, chorus by chorus, the song becomes part of you. And then you’re just hooked on it, and you find yourself with it goes around and around and around. You live with them. I’ve been living with these songs on ‘Nostalgia’ for a year and a half now, and I still kind of find myself intrigued by them.”
There was no use to copy the style of other singers who have left their marks on the works.
“That’s the thing about trying to channel other singers,” Lennox said. “Then you become ersatz. It becomes a sort of pale [imitation]. You have to find your own language. You have to find your own voice.
“As a young singer growing up, I listened to everybody. Stevie Wonder a lot and Joni Mitchell a lot,” she said. “And I sang and sang and sang and sang, but I knew eventually I have to find my voice.
“With Eurythmics, Dave and I were trying to create a sound. And I think we really hit our stride when we wrote and recorded ‘Sweet Dreams,’ that whole album. We created this particular sound with a particular stylistic approach. And it really spoke for us. I knew then: This is who we are. This is really who we are stylistically. This is what we’re about.
“But I think you don’t just stay there. You have to keep evolving. And that is why there was a lot of change in the Eurythmics,” she said. “At some point, we came out more guitar oriented, and sometimes it was more synth. Sometimes it was a little bit more, I don’t know, soulified. But just because music is there; it’s like it’s in the atmosphere. And if you’re a musician, you soak it up, and it just comes through.”
As for the material on “Nostaligia,” she said, “when you hear this music, if you like it, you can close your eyes and you can kind of drift off into a reverie … it’s about this kind of atmosphere of our entire kind of collective, cultural nostalgia.”
Of the album’s 12 tracks, Lennox said, “every single one I felt had to be there. And there’s a journey right from the very start of ‘Nostalgia’ taking you through to a mood, the darkest mood which, if you had a vinyl copy, would be the last track [on side one], Track No. 6, which is ‘Strange Fruit,’ which is so, so, so dark. Then you flip it on the other side, and you come into a sort of sentimental, beautiful, romantic kind of aspect of it all.
“Nostalgia of itself has to be a mix of everything, The light, the shade, the good, the bad and the ugly, you know. And some aspects of that are, I discovered, in those songs. The whole fact that the civil rights movement hadn’t even begun at that point is very, very telling for me as an artist, and to think that I have been so influenced by African American music that goes way back to African roots is so it’s so moving and so powerful. I mean, I would like to see a world that had no color, no skin color. I’d love to see that world that was completely irrelevant what color of skin you had. Because I feel that music is the connector you see.
“I mean that really sincerely because I’ve always been really distressed by the fact that people could be bigoted and can have sort of a racial bias of any kind or religious hatred,” Lennox said. “I sing with my white skin; I sing music that I revere coming from an African root. Now, some people might take issue with that. I don’t know. But I always say music is the great healer, is the powerful connecting force, and I really believe that.”
To that point, Lennox spoke to the brief controversy when some complained that her talking about “Strange Fruit,” the powerful song addressing hanging of black men in the South, on “Tavis Smiley,” she did not mention its violent inspirations, as if white-washing it of meaning.
“I was talking to Tavis. We were having a conversation, and I was very engaged with him,” Lennox said. “And I guess I was thinking at the time he knows what I’m talking about. I wasn’t thinking about the other picture. I was thinking more about the undercurrent of violence that is inherent in the entire human race. So I didn’t refer to the lynchings in our interview because I already assumed, obviously, that Tavis, being an incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable man, especially of African origin, would know what I was talking about.
“And then somebody took issue with that, and the whole thing exploded, and it was so painful for me. It was so painful. I can’t even begin to tell you, because I’m the last person that would disrespect that history. And then one person put on a nasty blog this, and the whole thing blew out of context, and I couldn’t come back, because if I did that, it would all get blown up again, so I had to just be quiet, and this is a phenomena of our times that we live in with Twitter and social media and everybody commenting is that it’s very tricky.
“You can say something and be damned for it or not say something and be damned for that, and the Chinese whispers and the whole kind of whispering thing that goes on, it kind of shut me up because I thought, wow. I made a DVD about this album, and the very first thing I said when it came, this was about the lynchings in the deep South. It’s a shame, shameful thing. It’s tricky because you say something, you’re damned for it.
“But it’s very delicate. And the last thing I would have thought was that people would say, ‘Oh, she didn’t mention the lynchings in the South.’ And I don’t know if I’ve expressed how I felt about it, but, you know, I’m a person who really, really cares about social injustice, and racism is so vile to me and it disturbs me. Since I was a kid, I’ve been distressed by this, the fact that there’s still so much injustice, and I go to South Africa, and I spend time there, and I go post apartheid, and I see economic apartheid. The fact that nothing has really evolved for millions of people living there. And it it breaks my heart …”
“But let me just say, if I offended anyone, anyone, about not mentioning lynchings, I wholeheartedly apologize, but it was never intended. And I was hurt by this nasty blog. It was an opportunistic swipe at me, to be quite frank.”
I asked her whether her performance would include songs that aren’t on the “Nostalgia” album, and she said no. But an advance tape of the concert shows she did relent, eventually, in the encore to sing two of her older songs, “Here Comes the Rain Again” and “Why,’ both solo at the piano.
She seems, in the concert, energized by the crowd reaction, and much younger than her stated years.
“I proud to say I’m 60,” she said. “I think it’s important I’m not ageist, and I don’t think the world should be. And I feel I don’t want to be limited by my age. I haven’t had Botox. I haven’t done any lifts yet significantly.
“Quite frankly, women that go and have a lot of plastic surgery, they’re doing it out of a sense of insecurity because they’re hammered by perfect images. So I don’t want to be that person. I’m insecure about the way I look. I think every woman is, unless they’re narcissistic.”
But show business is so dependent on image these days, she said. “The world is filled with celebrity, and it’s a whole other value.
“I feel myself sort of lumped into celebrity, and I don’t feel comfortable in that space. I feel myself as an artist and someone who communicates with people. The celebrity bit has always made me cringe, and it’s just amped up so much now. I’m at odds with many, many things in the industry of music and fame and celebrity.”
Lennox said has thought of quitting quite often. “So many things could just make you say, ‘What’s the point?’ But then, you know, you do what you’re sort of drawn to do.”