Lenny Kravitz

Kravitz Brings his ‘Love Revolution’ to the people
By Joseph Monish

Having been in the public spotlight since his career began nearly two decades ago, Lenny Kravitz is accustomed to being a boldfaced names in gossip rags. But that does not mean the rocker is keen on wearing the label of “celebrity.”

“It’s all really ridiculous, the tabloidy stuff and the chatter that comes with it,” says Kravitz, whose globetrotting exploits have been well-chronicled. “For me, my life’s just about music and the personal relationships I’ve made in my life. It sounds hard to believe but I don’t like the spotlight so much.”

Kravitz can certainly back up his words. While finishing work on his latest album, It Is Time For A Love Revolution, the 43-year old star retreated to the Brazilian countryside, hours away from urban civilization. “I went to Brazil to play Live Earth (the global environmental awareness concert organized by Vice President Al Gore) and I stayed for nearly four months. I just really fell in love with the place.”

Kravitz lived on a farm owned by a friend and recorded songs he had been writing since early 2006 in places like Paris and New York. “It was four hours outside of Rio (De Janeiro) and you’ve never seen anything more beautiful,” he boasts. “Lush gardens, wild native animals, parrots flying around – nature is incredible when it’s not interfered with. Sometimes you would go days without seeing another person. It’s a thousand acres of your own place.”

For him, the physical and psychic space was necessary, he says. “The last couple of years I’ve just been raising my daughter and taking time to travel and relax. It helped me get to a really good place, creatively and spiritually.”

The self-imposed isolation gave Kravitz the freedom to pursue a purer, more raw energy for his new album, his eighth. He contends that this record elicited the feelings of his youth, when he was dreaming of rock stardom as a teenager in his southern California bedroom. “If you think about it,” he explains, “it’s not often that you’re alone and can just be creative. My last album (2005’s Baptism) was all about a lot of heavy questions – Who am I? What am I doing? What does this all mean? And so I was able to find this space where I could just be creative again, like starting over.”

The album is a powerhouse that returns to Kravitz’s rock largess, and it’s filled with, “fat riffs, fat drums, fat bass – and put it all in your face.” By his own admission, Kravitz was more occupied with Led Zeppelin than Home Economics when he was an adolescent growing up in Los Angeles. Those proved to be formative years for him and that classic rock meme is evident on his new album.

The “Love Revolution” he speaks of is his call-to-arms for people to focus their energies in more positive directions, a message he has consistently espoused since his debut album, Let Love Rule, in 1989. Says Kravitz, “It takes energy to make war and to be negative. If we could just change how that energy is focused and use it for being positive, a lot of things in this world could change.”
‘It is Time for a Love Revolution’  Out Now  – Virgin Records