Lennox Runs for Cover : Her new album ‘Medusa’ is made up of other artists’ songs. She regards the effort as venturing into ‘very sacred’ pop territory.

Annie Lennox’s second solo album, “Medusa,” consists entirely of other people’s songs, most from artists as well-known as she, from the Temptations to Neil Young. And, yes, she does understand that in this day, releasing a collection of “covers” could be viewed as tantamount to a paucity of ideas.

But Lennox feels she made this recording the old-fashioned way. (Cue John Houseman.)

“I felt I’d earned it,” says the ex-Eurythmics singer. “I’ve been writing my own material, alone and with (Eurythmics partner) Dave Stewart, for a very long time now. It seems to me that you have to establish yourself. Too soon, and nobody takes you seriously. Everybody thinks this is lightweight stuff, or arrogant.

“And I still think people are going to want to execute me for this. But I waited a long time. I felt I’d earned the right to record other people’s songs and to be more an interpretive artist, as opposed to the source of it all.”

Lest this seem a lark, she points out that she took longer recording “Medusa” than she did “Diva,” her acclaimed 1992 solo debut.

“It was not something to be dabbled with easily. You don’t sing a Bob Marley song lightly. This man is revered. All of the artists, actually, with a few exceptions, are symbolically in the culture very important landmarks, so I’m not about to saunter in and go ‘Heigh-ho, I’m gonna sing you a song because I happen to be a fairly well-known person.’ I was going into very sacred territory, as far as I was concerned.” ( See review, Page 74.)

Some songs are completely reinvented, including the Clash’s “Train in Vain,” now a gospel/soul sing-along with a bouncy, hugely infectious acoustic bass line.

But radical wasn’t a prerequisite for all the interpretations. Procol Harum’s 1967 “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” for example, receives a surprisingly faithful, if still subliminally retooled, arrangement.

That single “was the first adult record I ever bought, knowing that there was another world out there that was kind of hip,” says Lennox, 40.

“I was a young adolescent, living in a small provincial town in Scotland, and it was the trickle-down theory, knowing that in San Francisco people were buying bells and flowers and incense. You got word of it down the line, that somewhere there was something going on that maybe would be very interesting. But culturally, I might as well have been living in Poland. That song for me was a connecting line with a culture that I’d heard whispers about.”

Besides the personal associations of “Whiter Shade,” she says “the song itself is interesting because it makes all sense and no sense at the same time. Lyrically it is completely surreal and abstract, and yet somehow emotively, it connects to me, and it sort of says how I feel about things. Actually, it’s quite melancholic. So I didn’t have to learn the song. It was already in there, in my bones, if you like.”

There’s a lot in those bones. For all her declarations of independence, Lennox quickly owns up to her own absorptive qualities.

“My husband (filmmaker Uri Fruchtmann) knows me rather well, and sometimes explains me better than I know myself,” she says. “And he told me the other day that he reckons that I’m a kind of Hoover.” She chuckles at the idea of fancying herself a vacuum.

“I thought it was very perceptive of him because I didn’t even realize that was how I functioned. It’s as if everything comes into me, and then something comes out without much of an intellectual thought process. Sometimes if I’m in a room with people and they’re acting a particular way, I’ll tend to act like them, as if I echo them. It can be the same way with a song--like I almost ‘get’ it so strongly that I know it and can bring it out another way, my way.

“It’s hard to explain it,” she says of her chameleonic tendencies. “But hard to live with, as well. I wouldn’t like to be like this, really, if I had a choice.”

Nibbling on vegetarian dim sum in the restaurant at her Beverly Hills hotel, Lennox is decidedly not echoing this particular room. She’s describing how she began to cry unaccountably while recording the Blue Nile song “Downtown Lights,” an experience she’d never had in the studio, and one that seems very far away right now.

“That’s the beauty of music, that there is something very basic, very fundamental in it, if you can get to it,” she says, leaning in over the table, full of evangelistic intensity.

“There’s a truth in it somewhere. It’s not just the music industry. It’s not just the Grammy Awards. It’s not all of these Armani suits and Versace suits and power business meetings with lowered voices at the Four Seasons Hotel.”

Lately, Lennox herself has favored not Armani but Minnie--as in the Minnie Mouse ears she wore to the Grammys, along with an equally attention-getting rubber outfit. A decade ago, Lennox went on the telecast in full Elvis drag. She says these sorts of sartorial statements aren’t just provocation, but her way of separating herself from the hype by heightening it, in her fashion--literally.

“I feel I have to make some sort of surrealistic statement, because if I don’t, I feel I’ve come down to the level of some sort of banality. I do that almost as a piece of performance art, because otherwise it’s too simplistic just to come to the Grammys and slap each other on the backs and all that. It is a kind of beast, and I’m in it to a point. But I keep a big distance away from it normally, so when I do come to it, I have a big shield.”

At the moment, Lennox is shield-less, set apart from the room possibly by being one of the least remarkable-looking people in it. Her close-cropped brown hair might be described as mousy or stylish, depending on the eye of the beholder. Sans makeup and behind wire-rim glasses, her green eyes--so huge, vivid and confrontational in photographs--are life-sized and non-threatening, not the kind of peepers that might turn a mortal into stone.

Moreover, against all expectations, she’s warm, chatty and effusively Scottish, not the cool, calculating Brit many imagined ever since she played the grinning harlequin 12 years ago in Eurythmics’ indelible “Sweet Dreams” video.

Lennox and co-Eurythmic Stewart “took to video like ducks to water,” but may have been so successful in their iconographic morphing that the music often wasn’t taken as seriously as it should have been. All the duo’s albums included good, interesting work, but by 1990’s “We Too Are One,” the public had lost interest.

“We had lost interest, too,” says Lennox. “The title was totally ironic, because by the point we made ‘We Too Are One’ we couldn’t be together in the room. So it’s a kind of fantastic Zen statement about Eurythmics, because we were so contradictory in so many respects.”

Lennox’s first solo album, “Diva,” was low-key by Eurythmics standards--true to her self-described “dark” personality--and few expected it to be such a smash, least of all her. She’s no longer “the biggest doubter in the world,” as she called herself in a Times interview three years ago.

“To be frank,” the acceptance “did my confidence a lot of good. Because when I worked with Dave, for some reason, I never dreamed that I could do anything on my own. I was very, very committed to the notion of us being a duo and never had a lurking ambition to be a solo artist. When Eurythmics ceased to be, I wasn’t going around thinking that I would prove something. I was certain no one would want to work with me!

“I just went back to my life, and gradually realized that actually music-making meant such a lot to me, and in some way did have a lot to do with my sense of self. This possibility to express myself really was central to my whole being, and I’d rather taken it for granted.”

That centrality doesn’t include the rigors of touring, however. Lennox didn’t perform live to promote “Diva,” and won’t for “Medusa.” Her two kids, waiting in the hotel room upstairs, are the main reason for moderation.

“On the one hand,” she allows, refraining from the road “is a pity, because I feel I have got this area in my soul that needs to perform and likes to and might even be quite good at it. When you have a skill, you want to test it out.

“But touring is very demanding, because if you are a vocalist, then you are the point of reference for everybody, and you have to be in peak form. If you’re tired or fractious or below par, it’s very draining to always have to be that one who’s up front being inspiring. Each time you go to a city, those people have never seen you before. I always used to feel like a boxer who’s going into the ring.

“For the moment, that’s out of bounds for me. That’s too high a price to pay, to put that domestic family life in any kind of fragile position. I’m very fortunate in that I’m able to make records and make videos and spread my work out enough so that it doesn’t impinge upon my family life. And I try to get the balance right, just like every working mother does in some way or another.”

When these promotional visits are over and she’s back in Scotland, she vows, “I won’t even think about the record. I’ll just go back and do things that I want to do, like put my photographs in order in books, put my bookshelves straight, be with my children--things people do . There’s no (career) game plan in this. It cannot be like that; I would die.”

Lennox got to this point of being allowed to concentrate primarily on family the old-fashioned way. (Cue Houseman again.)

“When we were in Eurythmics all those years, we always knew a year in advance, ‘This is the game plan, this is where we’re going to be.’ And it was necessary. Obviously at a certain point you have to focus in on something; if you’re going to be a great runner, then you’re going to be spending five hours or whatever a day training.

“But ahhhh,” she sighs, rising to rejoin her kids upstairs, “I don’t want to be in that situation now. It’s not that important. It takes away any chance of any ordinary life, and the ordinary world is of immense importance to me, as well as this more esoteric one.”

Sweet dreams are made of . . . domesticity? That, at least, is the game plan.*