Annie Lennox on new album: "It's a great feeling"

It's an ideal marriage: classic American songs and one of Britain's greatest singers, Anthony Mason reports.

Annie Lennox said what brought her to the American songbook was "curiosity."

"Jazz has never been my genre," she said. "But I always like to do something a little bit different because it challenges my own boundaries and pushes it into something that's fresh."

Lennox started singing as a girl in Aberdeen, Scotland. A grant to study at the Royal Academy of Music earned her a ticket to London.

"I was definitely looking for an escape," she said. "... I had an idea that my tribe, whoever they would be, were living in a place like that. I never found them. But I found Dave, and in a way I found a kind of tribe in him."

Lennox and Dave Stewart formed the Eurythmics and, through the '80s, had a run of influential hit records.

"We collaborated in a particular way where we were really in tune with each other," she said. "It was almost telepathic. I don't mean that to be 'ooooh,' but we really understood each other very well. That language and what we were trying to express, it was fantastic."

Most striking about Lennox was not just her music, but also her fashion.

"I would rather say style," she said. "Because I think fashion is something so temporary and something that you chase."

Lennox, who's been critical of overtly sexual performances by contemporary artists like Miley Cyrus, was rebelling against that in her own time.

"This aspect of gender and gender equality or what it is to be a woman," she said. "And especially as a performer where you're so very often objectified. I didn't want to be that person. It wasn't who I was. So I felt empowered in the costume that I was wearing, whatever it happened to be."

When the Eurythmics split in the '90s, Lennox launched a solo career. But then the singer, who's sold more than 80 million records, decided to put the breaks on it all.

"I did start feeling like I need to get off this track," she said. "And that was my sense. It's like, 'You know what? I just really need to go away quietly and just live a little bit of a more normal life, if you like.'"

But Lennox said it's great to be back.

"I've made this album, 'Nostalgia,' absolutely for the love of it. There's no other reason for me to make an album," she said. "But I created this for the love of it. And that's a great place to be, I can tell you. It's a great feeling."