Music: Annie Lennox Sings Pop Standards On 'nostalgia’

Annie Lennox inhabits the songs on “Nostalgia,” her new album of pop standards, so completely that most people assume she has been singing her way through the Great American Songbook for years. [...] the singer says it was only after several recent late-night YouTube browsing sessions that she discovered the tunes that make up the record — classics by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, George Gershwin and Billie Holiday. “People ask me if I grew up with these songs and, to be honest, I didn’t,” says Lennox, in her familiar Scottish burr. In the Bay Area for a whirlwind promotional tour, the former Eurythmics singer sits in the lobby of a hotel near Fisherman’s Wharf — radiating her casual glamour among the beige surroundings. Answers about the making of her first new album in seven years (not counting the 2010 holiday release, “A Christmas Cornucopia”) are frequently diverted by her anxieties over war, oppression, injustice, human rights and poverty. Nostalgia,” out Tuesdayon Blue Note Records, offers her highly personalized takes on familiar tunes like George and Ira Gershwin’s “Summertime,” Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell’s “Georgia on My Mind. While she did record a version of Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” for the “Red Hot + Blue” benefit album for AIDS awareness, she says that for “Nostalgia,” she merely wanted to see how her voice would work within a genre she had never fully explored. To get the most out of the meanings and words behind the songs, Lennox and her creative partner, Mike Stevens, opted for minimal arrangements that mostly serve to highlight her husky, soulful voice. “I rigidly stuck my heels in and said I’m not going the conventional route with strings and saccharine,” she says. Lennox remains politically and socially active, particularly with her campaign to raise money and awareness about HIV and AIDS in Africa.