Pop Icon Annie Lennox Reflects on the Certainty of Death

Music legend, Annie Lenox
Credit: flipboard.com

Annie Lennox is a legend. Unarguably the better half of the Eurythmics, the duo she formed with songwriter and record producer Dave Stewart in 1980, she has been celebrated for four decades as an icon, an innovator, and one of the top female vocalists of her time. She is also an accomplished artist, musician, philanthropist and mom.

Today, Annie Lennox is entering her seventh decade and looking back on the life she created for herself. After the Eurythmics dissolved in 1990, she pursued a sporadic but very successful career as a solo vocalist while devoting most of her time to raising her two girls. She became a fervent AIDS activist, working tirelessly to help women and girls in Africa affected by the disease. She is also the founder of The Circle, a nonprofit that works to support some of the most marginalized women in the world. And she was recently named as the first female Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland where she grew up.

And now, at 64, she has created her first piece of installation art — an eclectic collection of artifacts from her life, which she titled “Now I Let You Go.”

A doll and a small piece of notepaper bearing the lyrics to “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” are part of Lennox’s “Now I Let You Go”
Credit: MASS MoCA

On display at Mass MoCA through January 2020, “Now I Let You Go” is at once deeply personal and infinitely relatable — an aging woman’s heartfelt attempt to come to terms with her own impermanence and the looming reality of death.

In a NY Times interview last May, Lennox asked Jillian Steinhauer, “The one thing guaranteed us all, what is it?” Then she quickly answered her own question “That we’re going to die.”

And one thing we all want on some level is to remember and to be remembered — to find a way to leave some essential part of ourselves to those we leave behind.

“We don’t have a ritual in the Western world for this,” Lennox added. “We just don’t know what to do with what’s left behind.” And so — innovator that she is — she created her own ritual, building an 8-foot-high mound of dirt and decorating it with over 250 pieces of her life — her daughter’s shoes and childhood toys, a mask given to her by an ex-boyfriend, her father’s bagpipes, her mother’s sewing machine, a glass-encased statue of Mickey Mouse. Each group of artifacts is arranged in a way that it tells a story, or at least that’s the artist hope. To facilitate that, she has created an annotated “field guide” for the exhibit in which she discusses many of the items and why they have meaning for her.

A piano sits atop Lennox’s art installation “Now I Let You Go” 
Credit: MASS MoCA

Arguably the most meaningful of all the artifacts on the mound is the piano that sits directly on top, illuminated by a single spotlight and sitting slightly askew. “The piano has been so, so, so significant all through my life,” Lennox said. “Since I was 3 years old, and I was given a toy piano. And I picked out tunes, and my parents … identified that I had a musical gift.”

Fittingly, “Now I Let You Go” also highlights some of Annie Lennox’s music, including a compilation of soothing piano melodies that she recorded long ago. Lennox calls the tunes “butterfly music” and has made them available for the show on a free, online EP. It’s aptly named “Lepidoptera” — the order of insects that includes butterflies and moths.

Barbie dolls and a Mickey Mouse statue are among the artifacts in the Annie Lennox exhibit “Now I Let You Go”
Credit: MASS MoCA

Also accompanying the exhibit, in a separate room, are some of Lennox’s old music videos playing backward on a wall, while a second gallery plays the Eurythmics’ hit “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” — also in reverse. The combined effect of the two is both disconcerting and enthralling at the same time. 

All in all, Annie Lennox’s “Now I Let You Go” is mesmerizing. The artist’s public persona comes through loud and clear. But so, too, does her compassion, vulnerability and deep need to relate on a personal level to the world.

As she said in her artist’s statement for MASS MoCA:

In time, we will all disappear from this earth.

This is our destiny.

What will we leave behind? Who will remember us — and for how long?

The mound is a glorious metaphor for the ultimate conclusion of all material manifestations.

We cling — consciously or unconsciously to ‘things’ that are endowed with emotional significance — keeping memories alive, while the uncomfortable awareness of the inevitable moment of departure is held at bay.