On her first album in four years, she starts out singing about the "Dark Road" she's on, bumpy with "the same old madness." At the CD's close, 10 tracks later, she traces the space between a lover and herself that measures as great a distance as between the Earth and the moon.
Warning: There's not much more uplift in the songs between.
"Most of us in the world are wounded," Lennox says. "It's very rare that a person has found an arrival point of peace and acceptance. We're scarred and pitted with all the experiences we've had that have been difficult. I am no exception."
Except, of course, in her ability to provide her own calming balm through the creamy sustenance of her voice. If anything, Lennox's tone, at 52, sounds more stalwart and maternally reassuring than ever. It's a balance she very much needs for an album deservedly titled "Songs of Mass Destruction."
The disk follows a CD that itself was no picnic. "Bare," in 2003, chronicled the collapse of Lennox's marriage to film producer Uri Fruchtmann, who fathered her two daughters. The disk didn't recoil from cataloguing every consequence of rejection. Lennox quibbles, however, with the notion that "Bare" was her "divorce album."
"It wasn't about the end of my marriage," she says. "That wouldn't have been very responsible to my children. It came about through those circumstances, which were very difficult." Her marriage, she says, was part of the album "only by proxy."
"Bare" became a pained experience for more reasons than its inspiration. Lennox started cutting it with one producer, who didn't work out, which forced her to scrap that effort and start all over again. Then her mother became gravely ill, and the singer wanted to spend more time with her.
That, along with raising her two young daughters, helps explain the 11-year gap between Lennox's first solo CD, the classic "Diva," and "Bare." The only disk that appeared in between (1995's "Medusa") was comprised entirely of cover songs.
Lennox, who worked more speedily with her hit band The Eurythmics in the '80s, doesn't regret the rarity of her solo work.
"What's the point in being prolific if you're not coming out with work of import?" she says. "Prince puts out albums every year. And to me, he's a genius, but you can get too much of a good thing."
For "Mass Destruction," Lennox broke some recording patterns. She didn't work with her usual producer (Steve Lipson) but teamed instead with Glen Ballard, best known for his work with Alanis Morissette. Lennox met Ballard through ex-Eurythmic group-mate Dave Stewart. The main change he brought was leaner instrumentation in the tracks and a lack of fuss around Lennox's voice. It's the clearest we've heard her singing since the Eurythmics days.
"Glen said to me, 'Your voice is the apex of the recording,'" Lennox recalls. "'We don't need any clutter around it.'"
Lennox's melodies make full use of her range. The tracks allow her voice to ride the tunes in long, rich arcs. "My voice is very resonant in the room," Lennox says. "I like to see how far it will go."
Not all the songs slump in the direction of despair. "Sing" salutes the valor of women. To make the point, Lennox cobbled together a choir of no fewer than 23 of the world's most famous female singers, including Madonna, Celine Dion, k.d. lang, Shakira, Bonnie Raitt and Dido. The recording also promotes awareness and prevention of HIV transmission from mothers to daughters in Africa through various fund-raising means.
That's just one of the disk's worldly concerns. As the title suggests, some songs double as personal and political statements. The disillusionment in "Dark Road" could address an individual's estrangement or the decadence of the culture. "I look outside and I see a world that's still articulated through warfare," Lennox says. "I see savage destruction of our natural resources, the lack of decency when it comes to human rights, our ability to avoid helping others, the corruption of our politicians, big brother and the consumer spend-fest. It does seem we're on a downward spiral."
If that's not enough of a Debbie Downer speech, Lennox takes time out in our conversation to talk about the possible medical consequences of cell phones, which she thinks may cause new forms of cancer.
"Mass Destruction" indeed.
Still, Lennox says, we shouldn't take her title too literally, or assume it embraces the totality of her world view.
"I haven't written a nihilistic album," she says. "There's hope in it."
"But," she cautions, "it's a struggle to find it."
