When Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2020, followed by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame two years later, it prompted Stewart to revisit their Eurythmics‘ catalog again, live. “Everyone was going on about ‘Sweet Dreams’ [Eurythmics’ 1983 album ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’]. and it was the 40th anniversary, so I thought ‘ I should do that,’” Stewart tells American Songwriter. “So I put a band together.”
In 2023, Stewart returned to stage with the Eurythmics Songbook Tour and warmed up with a series of dates in Europe. As he commemorated the 40th anniversary of their breakthrough album Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), it was also his first time performing since the Meltdown Festival in London, England in 2019. “I thought I could take this on the road, it should be great,” Stewart tells American Songwriter. “Then COVID happened, and I forgot about it.”
Taking the show on tour with Bryan Adams in 2024 is almost like a “lithmus test” says Stewart. “It’s like an introduction of Eurythmics songs to America,” he says, “and the way you’re presenting them without putting yourself front and center straightaway.”
Stewart’s connection to Adams goes back four decades, to the Eurythmics’ earlier days. “He jumped on stage with Eurythmics in Canada in 1984 or something,” remembers Stewart. “He would come by my flat sometimes and had got into photography.”
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Becoming a professional photographer by the late 1990s, Adams photographed Lennox her for the cover of her 2009 greatest hits album The Annie Lennox Collection, along with other shoots with Cher, Iggy Pop, Jennifer Hudson, St. Vincent, and other artists. He also shot Lennox for the 2010 Hear the World campaign to bring awareness to impact of hearing loss.
[RELATED: 10 Songs You Didn’t Know Bryan Adams Wrote for Other Artists]
For the Songbook tour, Stewart reconfigured some arrangements and explored new interpretations of some of the Eurythmics’ iconic songs from “Here Comes the Rain Again,” “Would I Lie to You?” and “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves,” and more, all set around an all-female band of vocalists and musicians.
Along with Stewart on guitar are vocalists Judith Hill, who sang backing vocals for Michael Jackson and Prince, Vanessa Amorosi, RAHH, and Hannah Koppenburg, along with keyboardist Hannah Koppenburg, bassist Julia Lamb, and drummer Ellie East, and Indiara Sfair on harmonica.
“It’s amazing, because although I’ve always worked with loads of female artists, I’ve never had a band that’s all female before,” says Stewart. “Obviously, there was Annie and I, but it’s just got a certain feel, but it’s not soft or anything. It’s woman power, and it’s great being behind that.”
His band of women was mostly pieced together by him messaging musicians directly on Instagram. “I think ‘Sisters are Doing it for Themselves’ sums it up,” says Stewart referencing Eurythmics’ 1985 hit, featuring Aretha Franklin. “It’s a gang of girls and me. I’m like this old band leader. It’s like Quincy Jones and his orchestra. I’m the person in the background with all the arrangements and a wall of amazing female power.”
Stewart’s 23-year-old daughter Kaya—and Lennox’s goddaughter—will also perform in a number of shows on the tour. The younger Stewart released her self-titled debut in 2016 followed by If Things Go South in 2022, and recently formed the duo Kiss Bang with Max Mercier. “She’s a great little songwriter,” says Stewart of his daughter. “She’s always obsessed with music. She knows every song that comes on. It doesn’t matter if it’s some grime music out of England or some underground indie band from Nashville, she just seems she seems to know the words to everything.”
On the Eurythmics tour, Stewart insists in having no one in the background on stage. “I encourage everyone—singers, soloists, everybody—to be up front. There’s no microphones over here or there for the backing vocalists. Everybody is in front, and I’m playing the role of a bandleader and conductor instead, and it’s great because then I can just help orchestrate.”
[RELATED: American Songwriter 2023 Legends Issue 2023 Interview with Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart]
Now 40 years after Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Stewart admits that his connection to the songs has shifted, which is reflected in some of the new orchestrations around the shows. Performing the Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again,” “Missionary Man” and other songs within their catalog is a different experience now. “I’m no longer thinking ‘Oh I did that [on the song], therefore it should be like this. These songs can stand in any kind of rearrangement.”
He adds, “It changes. You look at everything from different sides, because as you get older, you have a different lens that you look through. I don’t know if I wrote it, or if somebody said it, but ‘Experience grinds the lens through which we perceive reality.’ It might be me that said it,” laughs Stewart. “I don’t know, but it’s a good quote.” (In a 2016 interview, Stewart said that his stepfather once shared the adage with him.)
For Stewart, it’s less about keeping the songs precious and within one form and more about letting them evolve. “My experience of making that song [‘Sweet Dreams’] was every tiny nuance that made it on to that eight-track tape recorder,” he says, “so every time I would hear it, I heard the way I was trying to make it work. Now I hear it completely differently.”
On tour, the Eurythmics 1986 song “Thorn in My Side,” transformed into a very “classy, strange jazzy arrangement,” on tour, says Stewart, with pianos, soprano sax, and the vocals set in a very ‘50s jazz way, along with a more acoustic version.
Before revisiting the Eurythmics’ catalog, Stewart expanded his own solo catalog, releasing the autobiographical Ebony McQueen in 2022, a collection of 26 songs, the album sketches his coming-of-age years growing up in Sunderland in Northern England and banded to his first loves, music, and a blues voodoo priestess. A year later, Stewart released the jazz album Cloud Walking, which he co-produced with his new bandmate Koppenburg. In 2023, Stewart also collaborated with Joss Stone on original music for the musical The Time Traveller’s Wife, based on Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 book and its 2009 film adaptation.
[Tickets to the 2024 Eurythmics Songbook Tour with Bryan Adams]
Prior to restarting his Eurythmics tour, Stewart also launched the creative collective, The Time Experience Project, featuring writers, composers, actors, and filmmakers. Along with Italian actress Greta Scarano and the Italian band Mokadelic, Stewart also released a 10-track rock opera, Who To Love in October of 2023, along with a companion film, which premiered at the Rome Film Festival.
As he approaches 72 in September 2024, Stewart can’t make sense of the retiring. “It’s funny, because the two letters in the beginning of the word, ‘re,’ means you’re starting up or rewiring something,” says Stewart. “I don’t know where the word retire stems from.”
He adds, “Retiring from what?”
Photo: Kristin Burns / Courtesy of Milestone Publicity
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