Annie Lennox delivered one of the finest performances of the 2015 Grammys, teaming up with Hozier for “Take Me to Church” and bringing the house down with her rendition of “I Put a Spell on You.” Turns out, the social-media consensus that was quick to champion her that night also kinda freaks her out.
“It’s like the Roman Empire: You get the thumbs up and everybody loves you,” Lennox told Vogue in an interview released Wednesday (March 4). “Everybody is a critic nowadays and if they feel like they don’t like you, they can steam into you with such abuse. So it’s a schizophrenic experience.”
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Lennox didn’t realize the reaction was so strong until she went out to dinner after the show. “So many people were saying, “You were exploding on Twitter.” And I was like, ‘Really?’ I just did what I did and I never know how people are going to take it. Sometimes people love you, sometimes they hate you.”
She later called the internet a “schizoid place where I get approval and disapproval.”
Grammys 2015: Hozier & Annie Lennox Mashup ‘Take Me to Church/I Put a Spell on You’
Lennox also discussed how she reversed gender roles to bring out the best in “I Put a Spell On You”: “I thought about performing it, in a way, psychologically, it’s kind of like from the abused woman’s perspective. It seems to me that it could easily be from the perspective of a woman who has been so abused that she turns around and says, “I own you, and I don’t care if you don’t want me, I’m yours.” It’s so dominating.”
Lennox is hyping her forthcoming PBS documentary Annie Lennox: Nostalgia Live in Concert, which premieres on April 3. Her 2014 album Nostalgia featured classic covers from the Eurythmics singer, who doubts she’ll write music again: “For decades, I had a need to express something inside me that was dark, that needed to be brought out… I don’t want to be unhappy forever.”