Annie Lennox can sing whatever she wants

Annie Lennox born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on 25 December 1954, he turns 70 today. She became known to the general public as the singer of Eurythmicsformed together with Dave Stewart. And he began his solo career following the dissolution of the band in 1991. His solo journey began in 1992 with the album “Diva” and has six albums to date, the last of these “Nostalgia” in October 2014. Our review of the covers album follows “Nostalgia”.

Nostalgia, yes, but for what? Of a place or time gone by? By now we are thinking of this last meaning of the term, the temporal one. But modern “Nostalgia” was born as an “illness” of soldiers far from home, in the 17th century. A “space” disease, curable with return. While today’s nostalgia – and above all musical nostalgia, well told by Simon Reynolds in “Retromania” – is a careless yearning, for a time that no longer exists, that cannot return. An evil that can only be alleviated by (re)singing it or listening to it again.

“Nostalgia” by Annie Lennox is a record of covers – sorry, of standards – which explicitly plays on this ambiguous feeling. The opposite attitude of certain cover albums, which play in a decidedly more ambiguous way on presumed artistic needs, urges to reinterpret songs that in reality hide a crisis of inspiration or a simple desire to record albums with low creative maintenance and (presumed) high yield record company.

Never mind if “Nostalgia” is the third album of other people’s songs in a solo discography made up of six albums – even if the last one was a Christmas album that was remembered above all for one of the kitschest covers in history. By now Annie Lennox is more of an interpreter and with that mouth she can sing what she wants, to paraphrase an old Carosello.

“Nostalgia” puts together a collection of standards, hyper-classics of the American songbook. There is almost no particular research: songs like “Summertime” (Gershwin), “Mood indigo” (Duke Ellington), “The nearness of you” (Carmichael), “Strange fruit” (Billie Holiday), “I put a spell on you” (Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, but recalled in Nina Simone’s version), “Georgia on my mind” (Ray Charles). The classics among the classics.

What is striking about this album, in addition to reiterating the total class of Annie Lennox’s voice, is the restraint: class means never going over the top, also and above all having the power to do so – even in the arrangements (there is an influence , in the production of Mike Stevens and especially that old fox Don Was).

Too sophisticated to be a pop singer, Annie Lennox is also too pop to be sophisticated. At the time of Eurythmics he was light years ahead of the pop that was around, here he manages to be a jazz singer without naughtiness and without the precise coldness of certain standard albums. This is why songs already heard in every sauce like these work, in his version. To give a couple of examples, “God bless the child” seems like a ballad that could have been in the Eurythmics catalog (at least in those at the end of their career). A version like this of “I put a spell on you” could – indeed should have – been part of Amy Winehouse’s repertoire. And so on. In short: we can’t take any more covers and standards records. But then this voice makes up for everything, even yet another attack of nostalgia.