True confessions time: Back in the ’80s I had a crush on Annie Lennox, and it’s never gone away. Me and millions of others.

It wasn’t just her striking good looks and the magnetism of her performances that drew me in. It was also the complexity, nuance, and fierce intelligence in the music she made with Dave Stewart as the Eurythmics. Her solo career has been just as compelling.

I was thinking about this today after stumbling across a pair of videos in which Lennox talks about learning how to become an artist and sheds light on her own creative process.

The first was part of a series of short videos by The Atlantic exploring the idea of creative breakthroughs. To be an artist, she says here,

You don’t have to be the best, best, best. If you love doing what you’re doing and you have a passion for it, it’s good enough.

The second video was produced by the Victoria and Albert Museum to accompany an exhibition of celebrating her image and creative vision. That video opens with a discussion of the nature of inspiration:

The inspiration for song writing … hmmm … I think it starts with this capacity to respond to sound, to rhythm, to melodic line, to chordal progressions. And also at the core of it is something about needing to express something. I think that human beings are like sponges for all the externals that are affecting them.

To bring a lift to your Friday afternoon, here’s a performance of one of my favorite Eurythmics songs, recorded live in Sydney, Australia in 1987.