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ALBUM FACT FILE :
Album name: Bare
Producer: Stephen Lipson (who also produced Diva & Medusa and her concert in Central Park, New York in 1995).
Artwork : All photography by Annie Lennox with the help of her friend Allan Martin.
Album tracklist:
1. A Thousand Beautiful Things
2. Pavement Cracks
3. The Hurting Time
4. Honestly
5. Wonderful
6. Bitter Pill
7. Loneliness
8. The Saddest Song I've Got
9. Erased
10. Twisted
11. Oh God (Prayer)Release dates: 09.6.03 (Europe), 10.6.03 (US), 25.06.03 (Japan).
Record Labels: BMG (Worldwide), J Records (US).
* The release date for Annie Lennox's new album is confirmed for the 9th of June in Europe. The US release is a day later on the 10th, and the Japanese will have to wait until 25th June for their exclusive release with 12 tracks (as opposed to the normal edition which features 11), plus bonus tracks. There will however, be a limited edition CD released worldwide which will feature a DVD addition with a video interview and acoustic versions of 'A Thousand Beautiful Things' and 'Wonderful'.
* A DVD/VHS recording of the Toronto concert will be released around the same time (possibly June 9th).
* Annie says of the new album "I don't want to represent myself visually in some kind of cliched, airbrushed, saccharine kind of way. I want to reveal myself as I am.
"I am not a young artist in her early twenties, I am a mature woman facing up to failed expectations of life and facing up to core issues.
"I have never been known to toe the safety line in terms of how I represent myself. As an artist I need to be authentic, to take risks to break the mould when necessary.
"Bare contains songs that are deeply personal and emotional. In a sense, I have exposed myself through the work to reveal aspects of an inner world which are fragile and broken through experience, but not entirely smashed."
ANNIE'S TRACK BY TRACK ANALYSIS OF THE RECORD :"They [the songs] are about negative emotions. I have to admit that. There's simply no getting away from it In a way, this album belongs more on the Self Help shelves of a book shop, than in the record stores.
I always believed that artists had to suffer, I knew they had to have some dark shadow, carry some cross, in order to gain the stamp - the certificate of authenticity, as it were. And I tell you, I have it now. I've earned it. I'm there.
Whenever I feel the need to understand a situation, or to try and articulate my feelings, my instinct is to write. Well, I've been doing a lot of writing over these past four years, much of it for no-one else to read but myself. But out of that process have come these songs. Yes, of course, they're intensely personal, but they're fictitious as well as factual in that they're metaphoric and applicable to many different situations. I have a suspicion that a whole generation of people are going to identify with what I'm saying here.
The break-ups, the personal tragedies, the this, the that ... I don't know many people beyond a certain age who haven't experienced what I'm singing about. These feelings aren't unique to me. They're symptomatic of what it is to be an adult human being in this world."
Continue to the next page for Annie's track by track analysis >>>
