‘‘WE HAVE COWS.” It’s a glorious Califor nia mor ning, but Lenny Kravitz’s mind is in Brazil, specifically the for mer coffee plantation outside Rio de Janeiro that he’s transfor med into a farm.
“We do bamboo, eucalyptus, coffee and most of the fr uit and vegetables that grow in the state of Rio. We don’t eat the cows, of course,” he adds. “We just let them graze, eat grass and live.”
Rather like his cows, for the 35 years since his debut album Let Love Rule catapulted him to instant European fame and eventual American renown, Kravitz has grazed and lived. There’s been grass too.
For the past month, however, he’s been in Los Angeles, finetuning his twelf th album, the sparkling Blue Electric Light, the longest album of his career and one which distils almost all that is good about Lenny Kravitz.
Soon, he’ll be at the Golden Globes where his trombone-drenched Road To Freedom – from Rustin, the biopic of gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin – will lose out in the Best Original Song categor y to a Billie Eilish tune from Barbie. Right now, though, he can’t sit still. Sunglasses go on. He sits in the sun. He goes to get some water. Sunglasses go off. On his retur n, the sun has moved on. “Where’s the sunniest spot?” he wonders.
Kravitz, now 59, has always been restless. Mathieu Bitton, Alamy Raised in New York by Sy Kravitz, his television producer, Russian-Jewish father (“actually they were from Kyiv, so they ’d be Ukrainian Jews now”) and his African-American-Bahamian mother, the actress Roxie Roker, he flitted between his mater nal grandparents in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, where Lenny was Eddie, and the family home in uptown Manhattan, where Lenny was Lennie.
When her boy was 10, Roxie secured a lead role on the groundbreaking inter racial comedy The Jeffersons and the pair decamped to Los Angeles. He joined the Califor nia Boys Choir (his first gig: Mahler ’s third with the LA Philhar monic at the Hollywood Bowl), briefly became Romeo Blue and began the jour ney to Let Love Rule, loosely based around his relationship with Cosby Show actor Lisa Bonet and the ar rival of their daughter, Zoë.
Eleven always varied, mostly excellent, sometimes boundar ypushing albums later, Kravitz is a global superstar with sidelines in design, painting, brand endorsements and acting. In the autumn, he’ll take a break from the Blue Electric Light world tour to make an as-yet unnamed film about a fictional musician.
“I’m enjoying it more than ever,” he insists. “I’m hungrier and more inspired than I’ve ever been. I see a lot of people, friends even, who’re not pleased any more, not inspired any more. They ’ve become jaded and burnt out. That’s not where I am. I have a fire under neath me that’s greater than ever.”
What’s your first musical memory?
A Tchaikovsky symphony. I can’t remember which one, but I had this toy, Show ’N Tell, a plastic TV set-looking thing with a record player on top. You stuck a slide in, watched the screen and heard the music. I’d sing along to this Tchaikovsky number. Then it was Jackson 5, Motown, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, R&B, soul, jazz, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Parker, Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery and gospel. You see, when my parents went out, they took me with them. They could have left me at home, but I got to see and hear all this great music and theatre.
Given your parents’ jobs and roles as night people, your upbringing could have been feral.
It could, but it wasn’t. I come from a life of discipline. My mum gave me loving discipline and the values of hard work. From my dad, there was militaristic discipline.
How does an infant cope with seeing their mum on-stage, being different people every night?