GOING MY WAY

From aspiring band guy to multi-faceted solo superstar, Lenny Kravitz has worked with some of rock's greatest. On his new album, he's revisiting his youth.

- Niall Doherty

Lenny Kravitz says that when you’ve had a career stretching over three and a half decades, you learn to accept that your fortunes will shift every now and then. “The surf changes,” says the singer, guitarist and producer (and actor, fashion designer, author and design mogul), aptly looking out over the Pacific from his pad in Malibu, Los Angeles on a slightly gloomy February morning. “You’re riding little waves, then you’re riding moderate waves, then, oh wow, you’ve caught a huge one. Throughout a career of thirty-five years it goes up, down, every which direction.”

It has been a life of forward-facing restlessness for the now 59-year-old Kravitz, who emerged with the swaggering soul-funk of Let Love Rule in 1989, and went supernova with the jubilant rock’n’roll grooves of his third album, 1993’s Are You Gonna Go My Way. There has been little room for glancing back over eight records since, but Kravitz found himself in contemplative mood while making Blue Electric Light, his twelfth album (out on May 24). Prompted by the experience of revisiting his youth for his 2020 memoir, also titled Let Love Rule, it sees Kravitz imbue his sound with the synth-pop flourishes he obsessed over as a teen. Recorded at his studio in the Bahamas, the country where he normally resides, it captures Kravitz savouring what he sees as another big momentum shift on the horizon. “I feel as though I’m back in that magnitude of a wave and I’m enjoying every moment, because I did not take it in the first time,” he says. Life is good, he says, settling in for a career-spanning chat with Classic Rock. And why wouldn’t it be? He’s Lenny Kravitz.

Where was your head at when you started working on Blue Electric Light?