It doesn’t take much to get Annie Lennox talking passionately about politics.
Ask her what she thinks of the war in Iraq, and she’ll shift into a tirade about man’s inhumanity to man, terrorism, why the world needs to rethink war as a response to conflict.
“I was kind of really shocked at how our politicians can wave a cloak around the truth and people can be very easily deceived en masse,” said Lennox, who performs tonight at Macky Auditorium in Boulder.
To that end, she’s titled her new album “Songs of Mass Destruction.”
“Obviously, I was taking a pot shot, a swipe at the lie that we were given in our own country and here too, the excuse of going into Iraq,” said the Scottish-born singer, who lives in London.
But when it comes to the actual content of the songs, Lennox steers clear of any Bush-bashing or scathing social commentary.
Instead, most of the songs are crafted in a manner that’s become her trademark, with artful lyrics that speak to heartache from personal conflicts, not political ones.
“I’m not really a political songwriter in the terms of maybe Bob Dylan,” says the 52-year-old Lennox, looking regal with her short- cropped blond hair as she sits in a downtown New York hotel a few days before kicking off a U.S. tour.
“My songs are really about human condition, a feeling of polarity, confusion, beauty, sadness, despair, love, unrequited love,” she said. “These (are) historical human issues that people have been writing about … to come to terms with their own inner landscape.”
The Grammy- and Oscar-winning singer-songwriter has been particularly adept in translating pain into powerful, searing material. The music of Lennox, who first gained fame as the face of the duo the Eurythmics in the ’80s and later sold millions of records as a solo artist, is often filled with feelings of despair, even when seemingly upbeat, like the hit “Walking on Broken Glass.” The titles of the tunes on “Songs of Mass Destruction” – “Through the Glass Darkly,” “Dark Road,” “Smithereens” – continue that trend.
But the twice-divorced mother of two teenage daughters says she has become more hopeful as she has gotten older.
“It’s a mixture of the two things. I have to temper my responses. … Now, I am taking another response. I’m definitely going forward and definitely checking my negative behavior pattern.”
She has taken a more activist approach to some of the issues that have weighed her down, most notably traveling to South Africa and campaigning on behalf of women and children infected with HIV and AIDS in an attempt to stop the epidemic of new infections in that country.
SHOW INFO: Macky Auditorium, CU-Boulder campus, 7:30 tonight, $54.50-$69.50, or 303-830-8497.
