SOUL'D AT LAST: Lennox has quieted herself, slowed her tempo, cut the music down to the bone.

Annie Lennox has always been a soul singer at heart. And on her new Bare (J), her first studio release since 1995’s Medusa (Arista), she’s blossomed into one. Yes, the vocal disguises she’s famous for still appear: sometimes she sounds slim and incandescent, like Celine Dion, at others fulsome and hunky, like a female Bruce Springsteen. But here, on the most personal and generous 11 songs she’s ever committed to tape, Lennox almost always invites you to feel, and share, and linger in her vulnerabilities, her joys, her longings, and her loneliness. And at times she sings them in her own, close-up way.

As the star of Eurythmics, Lennox rarely if ever revealed herself. Heavily costumed, she dazzled, she distracted, she amazed you without ever bringing you to her side. She was a distant attraction lit up in a loud field of fire. A soul singer must raise her own hands. She must believe in a higher power, and she must convey that belief. Lennox, who in her first Eurythmic hit, "Sweet Dreams," sang, about love, that "Some of them want to hurt you/Some of them want to get hurt by you," then shrugged her shoulders in conclusion with the line "Who am I to disagree."

But there’s no shrugging of the shoulders on Bare. As she approaches 50, with her hitmaking years of international stardom behind her, Lennox has quieted herself, slowed her tempo, cut the music down to the bone. Moreover, the lyrics of these songs are hers, and they matter; they having nothing in common with the come-ons and want-you clichés that are so much a part of pop music. She doesn’t write about sex, sexiness, or doing a dance. Instead, her topics range from "Honesty" to "Loneliness" and "The Saddest Song I’ve Got," and what you read is what you hear: a voice sharp but hushed, humble in its smallness, brushed (but not smoothed) by keyboard melodies, guitar licks, and drumming that sound as near to unplugged as electronic instruments can.

Lennox sings front and center, declarative in the manner that Celine Dion, rebelling against irony, made famous. The direct approach suits the assertiveness she’s always stood for at the same time that her deft writing provides things worth being declarative about. The best of these songs is "Wonderful," a lullaby to a wanted lover, in which she begins by chastising herself — "Idiot me, stupid fool!/How could you be so uncool?" — and ends with a turn as surprising as it is passionate: "I want to hold you . . . and be so held back . . . "

Nowhere else does Lennox achieve this sublimity, but the restraint and the incandescence of her soulful vocals hold the spotlight. There’s simply no woman singing English-language pop today with anything close to her strong-willed, lush, patient approach to delivery. If Tina Turner could sing again, and practice restraint, she might sound like Lennox in "Loneliness"; Springsteen, on The Rising especially, expresses the same full-breasted yet sweet muscularity that Lennox imparts to "The Hurting Time," "Erased," and "The Saddest Song I’ve Got." In "The Hurting Time" she even challenges Lisa Stansfield, her only rival among British divas of the 1980s. The melody, and part of the lyric meaning, of "The Hurting Time" recalls William DeVaughn’s 1974 hit "Be Thankful for What You’ve Got" (itself a revisiting of Curtis Mayfield’s "Superfly"-era style); Stansfield’s métier is to sing 1970s soul, but where she sings it true to the mannerisms of the original (like Rory Block singing Mississippi blues), Lennox reinterprets the style, bending its plaintiveness to her own, stronger suit. If only Stansfield, with her unrivaled richness of tone, could, and would, do the same!

With "Pavement Cracks," the closest thing on Bare to a tune that takes the approach of current hitmaker producers, Lennox sings husky and winsome, like Beyoncé Knowles as interpreted by Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys. And no one — not Springsteen or Turner, not Dion, and certainly not Beyoncé Knowles — sounds like her in "Oh God (Prayer)," a track on which she draws her contralto down to an almost disembodied pianissimo as, supported by a delicate, singular flutter of electronic keyboard, she cries — whimpers, really — for a helping hand as if on bended knee. That is soul, and as soul she sings it.