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Annie Lennox has one of the most inimitable voices in popular music, and she loves a good sad song, sung well. These truisms merge on her latest CD, "Nostalgia."
What's more, on "Nostalgia," Annie captures, wonderfully, what makes jazz standards so appealing to artists no matter their genre. As old as these songs are, they find new life when a singer, with her artistry, dares to bring something different. Vocally, Annie is at her best since "Diva." Musically, Annie has delivered one of the finest American Songbook CDs released in the last 30 years.
At their most enthralling, songs from Annie's own rock and pop songbook -- like her classic "Why" from her "Diva" CD -- become haunting, capturing something lyrically blue. Sometimes sadness is captured no matter the underlying mood of the song's melody. Indeed, "Here Comes the Rain Again" and "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" from her Eurythmics days made her a pop star because she recognized something fetching in an unhappy or ironic lyric set to a contrasting uplifting melody.
On "Nostalgia," sad songs dominate as Annie plies her rock-trade vocals to produce an album of standards like no other I have heard. She takes songs - in the past often arranged with lush orchestral jazz underpinnings - and instead grounds them with primarily sparse arrangements of mostly 2 to 4 different instruments leaving mostly her vocal interpretations to provide the dramatics.
If you love contemplative music, Nostalgia's mainly minimal orchestration is infused with a captivating melancholic musical tension. Annie has included a few songs where even ostensibly hopeful lyrics are set to an underlying longing melody. Examples include her takes on the Hoagy Carmichael tunes, "Georgia on My Mind" and "Memphis in June." Sometimes, in order to evoke urgency, she will surround a forlorn lyric, like Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child," with an unexpected, old-school, rhythmically expressive vocal driven by Aretha-style background "ooh-whoops," as her musical story telling almost always finds a tension in the music that is somehow suited to a soulful rock underpinning, which, often, will effectively utilize both clear and raspy vocal tones.
And make no mistake about it, on "Nostalgia" Annie is a deft story teller. Her dexterous range spans from deep sulky husky blues on "Mood Indigo" to soaring highs on "I Can Dream Can't I." On the latter, her voice is, at first, piercing and vibrant, the hope within the dream lyric seemingly confident. As the sentiment requires, she changes, holding notes just long enough to let the hint of a rocker's vocal break sneak into her expressions, evoking fragility in order to reveal the promise of heartache that lingers throughout the song.
"Georgia On My Mind" starts out with percussive single-note plucks of an electric guitar that might accompany a rock ballad, smoothly switches to the call of a violin or two, and then settles into a gospel organ underpinning that effectively demonstrates how, musically, Annie attempts, and successfully delivers, something different here. Even as this song has been recorded many a time in many ways her rendition, easily, is one of my favorites.
"I Put a Spell on You" is masterful. It begins with a vocal by Annie that captures her almost as a gospel soloist accompanied by a spare piano and then evolves into a rock-blues vocal that is expansive, plaintive and pleading -- a vocal so commanding that there is no doubt that the person to which she sings will be unable to escape her enchantment. Easily one of Annie's best vocals ever.
On "Nostalgia," Annie does not retread others' steps as she re-imagines these standards. For example, often "Summertime" is over-arranged with symphonic grandeur to dramatize and contrast its lullaby sleepy-time feel. In Annie's version, with piano as the main and sometimes only accompaniment, the song becomes breathtaking solely due to the dexterity of Annie's vocal interpretation. A relatively soft comforting plea builds to a rousing vocal (sans orchestral overload) that is appended by a riff that finds Annie singing the word "Summertime" over and over again -- expertly stepping in and out of intentionally discordant jazz stylings of which Betty Carter would be proud -- before it ends with only Annie and piano. Sublime.
Annie's most faithful jazz interpretation is her cover of a Johnny Green tune made famous by Billie Holiday, "I Cover the Waterfront." Its smooth 4-part bass, jazz trumpet, brush drum and piano accompaniment is set against a mostly smoky Annie vocal in order to evoke, so very well, the angst resplendent in its lyric. Her rendition is so very powerfully rooted in jazz-ensemble tradition, its mood heavy but winsome. The scenes within the song are somehow made visceral, materializing before me as I listen, conjured by Annie's muscular vocal as she sings, "Away from the city that hurts and knocks \ I'm standing alone by the desolate docks \ In the still and the chill of the night...I'm watching the sea \ Will the one I love \ Be coming back to me."
On "Nostalgia," the melody is never lost in Annie's interpretations, as she lengthens some notes here and shortens others there to change slightly a familiar rhythm. With her vocals never far from poignant rock fundamentals, the result is that Annie, often expertly turns a lament into something uniquely beautiful. The only interpretation that falls short is "Strange Fruit," sung with an earnestness that nonetheless did not quite do justice to the gravity of its lyric.
Despite that shortcoming, Annie mostly astounds on "Nostalgia," finding vital emotion in well-known lyrics by mostly interpreting outside the orchestral focused norm of American Songbook arrangements crooned by modern artists who first found fame as pop, rock or R&B artists.
In so doing, Annie does not really hop on the bandwagon of pop singers who discovered, later in life, the American Songbook and attempted to sing it as the great masters did. Be it Jo Stafford's hit "You Belong to Me," another Hoagy Carmichael penned tune, "The Nearness of You," or the ubiquitous "September in the Rain" (recorded by artists as diverse as The Beatles, Guy Lombardo, Willie Nelson, Teresa Brewer, Sarah Vaughan and the Looney Tunes character, Gossamer), Annie strikes out on her own to re-invent the Songbook with a soulful modernity that remarkably does not eschew her rock-vocal beginnings.
Here the American Songbook is fit to Annie, not the other way around. The result is that what I have loved about Annie throughout her career is not lost. The vocals are as haunting and strong as ever as Annie engages listeners anew while reaffirming that a good sad song sung well can be healing, cathartic even. On "Nostalgia," she turns a somber mood into something triumphant as we marvel at a vocalist still near the top of her prowess.
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I love her music
I love her music. Did not know about her until she was on the Awards show. So I had to have Nostalgia. I play it almost every day. Anyone would be happy to hear her sing. She can really belt out the notes.
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LORAINE MARGARET BENNET
Great effort.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2023