Photo by Kristin Burns

If you still think of Dave Stewart as simply one-half of Eurythmics, the group he co-founded with Annie Lennox, then you’re living in the past. While Stewart is immensely proud of the music he made with Lennox, he’s equally pleased with his producing efforts (Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks), side projects (his documentary Deep Blues or upcoming musical adaptation of “Ghost,” which he co-wrote songs for with Glen Ballard) and books ( The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide ). With a new solo album, The Blackbird Diaries – his first in more than a decade – and aptly named super group SuperHeavy with Mick Jagger, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and A.R. Rahman, Stewart is at a creative zenith.

*What’s the story about Bryan Ferry sleeping in your bed that you reference in your new song “Can’t Get You Out of My Head?” *

I was producing Bryan Ferry and he really wanted to go to dinner at somebody’s place in Saint-Tropez, which was a long way from my house near Fréjus in the South of France. It was summer and I was like, “Oh, the traffic is going to be a nightmare. There’s only one little road going down there.” We went there and I was fed up going but I [decided to] film [the evening] on this little camera from the second we knocked on the door. I’ve got the very first second I ever saw my wife on film because she opened the door. It was a dinner party where they put people’s names around the table. I was seated next to her and Bryan was next to somebody who was chatting him up like crazy and driving him a bit bonkers. We’d both been allotted rooms to sleep in but he went in my bedroom and locked the door, which meant that I had to [sleep elsewhere]. Fortunately, it was with the woman I ended up marrying.

In your new song “The Well,” how does the imagery represent a relationship?

Sometimes you meet some people that are so needy that it’s never-ending – you can’t ever fulfill that hole, you know? It’s that thing of, "Well, hang on. If I put another rope down there to pull you up, you’re going to pull me in. I was talking about being cruel to be kind. In a way, sometimes you’ve got to climb around [the relationship] or walk away. When you have young children, at some point, you’ve got to let them cry and not be constantly at their beck-and-call because it can train them [to have] bad, needy kinds of habits.

You use the phrase “synchrodestiny” to talk about the moment when you saw a guitar in a London shop, which led to your new album The Blackbird Diaries. Can you share another example of such a moment?

I was standing on a hill in Jamaica [where] I have a house in the middle of nowhere. You never see any tourists or anything – it’s in a little village. And in Jamaica, they have these little sound systems that usually start up as the sun’s going down. When you stand in the middle of this sort of valley [near my house], you can hear three sound systems [from different villages] playing all this different stuff at once, and I had one of those firework moments where they all started to fit together. One of them started to sound – the way the Jamaican guy was hosting and rapping – like those Islamic prayers in the morning and the other one sounded like really heavy, dub bass. And one sounded a bit Asian and it all fused together. Then, this other one started to sound like blues and I thought, “Holy shit, that would be an amazing fusion.” That led to me thinking of SuperHeavy.

Is constraint – whether by time or instrumentation – an under appreciated creative catalyst?

Yes, absolutely. Annie [Lennox] and I only had an 8-track [when] we made “Sweet Dreams.” It’s like, “necessity’s the mother of invention.” These are the players, these are the instruments they’re playing and we’re recording it now – we’re not going to add on 20 other guitar players, synthesizers and an orchestra.

When you were making of your film Deep Blues (1991), R.L. Burnside taught you the song “Jumper on the Line” and you also got to see Junior Kimbrough perform at his Juke Joint.

When I went to make that film, there were very few people that had heard of [these musicians]. In fact, quite a few of them had never even made a recording. I was with my brother who was producing it with me and to try and get an interview with [someone like] R.L. Burnside, you’d have to meet him at this post office but then he wouldn’t be there. It took months and months to pin [musicians like him] down. You’d be walking up the trail and then, “oh no. They were here yesterday but they’re gone now.” But, eventually, we managed to catch some great stuff.

Did you really take LSD every day for a year?

I’d probably say [pauses] – a third of a year. LSD doesn’t wear off for about 24 hours, so I probably spent the next 48 recovering. I took it more times than anybody else that I’ve met – apart from Timothy Leary.