In conversation, Dave Stewart can spontaneously time-travel from where he sits in his home in Nashville to his 30s, his early childhood growing up in his parents’ row house in northwest England, to the early days of the Eurythmics or his stint living in Paris in the early ‘80s.

His stories pivot, divide and come back together a bit like the path of a river. Stewart, the Eurythmics cofounder, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member, producer, songwriter and screenwriter has spent the last few years considering the passage of time. It’s influenced much of his recent work, from rock opera and album Who to Love to his work with Joss Stone for the songbook to a theatrical adaptation of “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” which premiered late last year in the West End.

Stewart even explains the concept for his most recent album, jazz collection Cloud Walking, with a story that skips nearly 40 years back in time.

“When I first got any money at all—Annie [Lennox] and I … bought a little tiny apartment in Paris, and I could walk to this place called La Coupole, which is a huge, high-ceilinged brasserie, with a long, huge bar in it,” begins Stewart, who will perform alongside Canadian rocker Bryan Adams on the latter’s tour stop in San Jose later this month. “On the walls, they couldn’t really redecorate, because famous impressionists used to paint things so that they would be able to get some food. When I first walked in there, I had no idea what was on the bar menu. … The barman made me this vodka martini in a tiny glass. I was thinking, ‘It’s a very small drink.’ Halfway through it, I realize this is pretty strong. Also, I got a pen and paper out. This place, all film directors and writers; it’s where they all met. It sort of opened up that moment in time; you’re not completely drunk, but you’ve gone into that space between your thoughts, basically. I wrote a little bit of poetry, and from then on, I only ever drank this vodka martini.”

Dave Stewart is just getting started.

“About a year and a half ago. I launched, with a friend of mine, my own vodka, called Poetry, which goes back to me being in there and drinking half a martini and writing a poem. … So I said to Hannah [Koppenburg, pianist], who works with me in the band (we all love martinis in the band, partly my fault), ‘Oh! Let’s just write this old-fashioned jazz record to listen to while we’re having a martini.’ … We started to really love it. When we went to London and got in touch with the horn players at Ronnie Scott’s club, it started to become, ‘Let’s do another one.’ We made a whole album. We called it Cloud Walking because we were trying to think of the feeling you get halfway through that martini [and feel] just as if you could walk on cloud.”

Making a jazz album specifically so he could have appropriate accompaniment for martini drinking is on brand for someone who went from cofounding one of the ‘80s’ most influential bands to writing and producing for Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Bryan Ferry, Sinéad O’Connor, Aretha Franklin, Al Green and No Doubt, and then diving headfirst into composing for film soundtracks and for the stage.

It also fits his fascination with the understanding of time.

He’d thought of “Who to Love” while trying to kill time during lockdowns in 2020. That’s when he discovered Italian mob TV series “Gomorrah” on Netflix and fell in love with its music, which he found out was made by the band Mokadelic. He posted his praise on Instagram, which turned into a conversation and him asking the instrumental band if they could send him some music, which he’d “chop up” and overlay with lyrics. That turned into the first song, “Time Is a Masterpiece,” about a person losing track of time—experienced by many during that time.

The song sounded like a soundtrack to Stewart, and he began to write more, thinking of the project as a screenplay to a short film. He asked the band if they knew any Italian actors to perform the role of the person he was writing about, and they connected him with Greta Scarano. The story soon became about a musician in a band preparing for a televised performance but suddenly disassociating from time in her apartment.

Stewart wrote eight more songs atop that chopped-up score and then flew to Rome, where the team filmed the project at the famed Cinecittà studio (where Federico Fellini made some of his films) with director Giorgio Testi. The short film debuted at the Rome Film Festival in late 2023 and is still doing the rounds at others. Now he’s busy turning “Who to Love” into a script for a full-length narrative film.

Dave Stewart said he already had time on his brain when he was asked to work on the music to playwright Lauren Gunderson’s adaptation of “The Time Traveler’s Wife” with Joss Stone, an artist he’s worked with and produced since she was in her teens. He’s written for the stage before, most recently with Glen Ballard for the musical adaptation of the film “Ghost” more than a decade prior.

That’s when he realized that he recognized the ways in which he writes music was influenced by the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway records his father loudly played at home when Stewart was about 5, such as “The King and I,” “Oklahoma” and “Flower Drum Song.”

“Something was very familiar. … I was like, ‘Oh, hang on a minute! I think I know this kind of world.’ So that carried on into ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife,’” he said … “Why I’m fascinated by [writing for the stage] is because everything has to happen in an hour and 45 minutes. Scene, set changes, people getting dressed backstage in the different characters, the music—everything has to be on point. The lighting. Everything is much more complicated than a rock show.”

Stewart loves it so much that he’s writing his own theater script, a black comedy about people trapped in a theater, though he’s early in the process.

But it’s not like he’s putting the rock shows behind him. In 2023, Dave Stewart headlined a European and U.K. tour to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Eurythmics’ breakout album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This). His songwriting and one-time life partner, Annie Lennox, didn’t participate as she’s retired from performing, but gave her blessing. In an homage to her, he built a band of all female musicians (including Koppenburg) with three vocalists stepping in for Lennox: English artist RAHH, Australian Vanessa Amorosi and his daughter Kaya Stewart (Lennox’s goddaughter)—who, along with her sister Indya, both check in on their father during this hourlong conversation.

Now Stewart is bringing his “Eurythmics Songbook” experience on Bryan Adams’ 31-date arena tour in North America. The two became friends after Adams jumped on stage with the Eurythmics at a show in Canada in 1983 or ’84, Stewart explained.

“At the time, I didn’t know who he was. The crowd did,” he said, before jumping back down a memory rabbit hole, explaining how they bonded over a shared interest in photography in the mid-‘90s. Bryan Adams pursued photography professionally later.

“I had built this studio. Everywhere I go, I drive whoever I’m with mad because I go, ‘This would be a great studio,’” Stewart said. “In L.A., I built a house around the corner from Tom Petty, and then a studio at the bottom of the garden. Loads of people recorded there. George Harrison was living in my house, and the Traveling Wilburys recorded in the garden, and so did Michael Kamen, a great string arranger, who did the strings on ‘Here Comes the Rain Again.’ He was doing the score to ‘Robin Hood.’ That’s when he wrote the song [‘Everything I Do, I Do it For You’] with Bryan that was the massive ballad that was No. 1 around the world.”

While not the most obvious on-stage pairing, Stewart conceded, he felt more comfortable as an undercard in North America since he couldn’t perform with Lennox.

“I wanted people to experience the show as a surprise,” he said.

And what’s it like performing the Eurythmics songbook without Annie Lennox?

“I would never just … pick one person to be Annie, because that would be a nightmare for them. So I created a wall of amazing female musicians, eight of them. I step back into the role of almost like Sinatra at the Sands. I play the bandleader, arranger, stepping forward to play guitar solos, while I give every one of them the chance to be a star. The harmonica player from Brazil comes right to the front and blows everybody away; the saxophone player—the three singers are not standing with mic stands on the sides like you often see singing backup vocals; they’re all with hand-held mics at the front.”

Stewart and his band will get an hour on stage and won’t be wasting any time getting going.

“In that hour, I think we’ll be playing 11 songs like ‘Would I Lie To You?’ ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves,’ ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),’ ‘Here Comes the Rain Again,’” he said. “I think the audience will dig it. Also, it’s a powerful visual because the way we are dressed, and the sound and the songs themselves stand out.”

It’s the closest to a Eurythmics show fans are likely ever to get.

“Annie says ‘never say never.’ … She likes getting up and singing three songs on the piano,” he explained. “But those songs are hard to sing. The main reason she hasn’t toured for years and years and years … is the hurry up and wait, the anxiety, the stress of, ‘We’re gonna have to sing for two hours. Somebody’s got a cold, or the A/C’s on.’”

“Even as we were touring with the Eurythmics, she got also kind of lonely,” he added, explaining that the rush of performing in front of thousands of screaming fans one minute and being isolated in a hotel room the next because unwinding in a smoky club was bad for her voice affected her.

Making another Eurythmics album is also unlikely because of label pressure to promote an album with shows or loads of interviews.

“I would obviously do it,” he said. “In fact, whenever we get together, we write a song in an hour or less. I know how to record. And Annie’s amazing at structure, putting harmonies on, the lyrics. The two of us are like ‘one plus one equals three’ in the studio. I know that what Annie thinks is when you make an album, it’s great fun in the studio. … She’s at a different time of a life where she’s more interested in different things. She’s interested in the work that she’s doing with her charity. She seems to be interested and involved in political situations. She’s married to a doctor. They have a different life.”

Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart did briefly reunite and perform at their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2022. But other than the accomplishment and his tour, Stewart said he hasn’t thought much about the Eurythmics legacy—largely because he feels like the label that owns their catalog, Sony, no longer cares about their music. He pointed out how the band’s website—run by the label—is outdated and said that neither A&R reps nor anyone else from label came out to one of his 2023 shows or even emailed him about the tour.

Stewart compared the current state of the music industry to society in general, with a disappearing middle class—with artists like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran on one end and everyone else on the other, with the balance completely thrown off.

“It’s not like it used to be where bands … that were doing really well would sell like 150,000 albums and go on tour, and they had their niche audience. It’s very difficult now for any of those bands, and anybody starting,” he said. “I would like to create something lasting in various shapes and forms. Musically, the problem is, they [the label] own it. There’s some great live films. One that I really love was filmed in Rome, and if I was the label boss, I’d go, ‘It’s a great film, we should get it, go back to the master, have it distributed.’

“But at the end of the day, the music stands up. It’s alive, it’s around everywhere,” he said.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.