Music
Plus One
The 11 Best Lenny Kravitz Songs
Follow the faithful to Lenny Kravitz’s mega-gig at Gunnersbury Park this summer and get ready to shout back these all-time classics
Stand in the front row at a Lenny Kravitz concert and you’ll become cooler just by association. All leather, shades, dread-shaking yelps and stadium-quaking guitar solos, the official line is that Kravitz hails from New York City – but we’re secretly convinced he’s really an alien beamed down from Planet Rock.
Honestly, you’d book tickets just to stand within plectrum-flicking distance of this funk-soul talisman. But while Kravitz is the perfect rockstar on paper, you don’t last almost four decades in this business without tunes – and the absurdly well-preserved 61-year-old will hit you with every gem from his Grammy-winning catalogue at London’s Gunnersbury Park on Saturday 15 August.
From the rampaging hits of his ’90s breakout to the deep-cut fan favourites you’ve always wanted to hear blasted through pendulous speaker stacks, these are the 11 unmissable Lenny Kravitz classics that leave other setlists eating dust.
11. ‘Let Love Rule’
(Let Love Rule, 1989)
With Virgin winning the bidding war for his debut album, Kravitz’s scalded fretwork earned instant comparison to Jimi Hendrix – but the title track’s peace ‘n’ love manifesto was closer to solo-period Lennon. In cynical times, the lyric seemed laughably idealistic (“Everyone said what a naive piece of shit it was,” he recalled). But the chorus’s rising psychedelic chant, swollen brass solo and vamped outro remains irredeemably funky.
10. ‘Believe’
(Are You Gonna Go My Way, 1993)
It opens with a beatific church organ, a flutter of Eastern strings and a woozy verse that unfolds like a 3am conversation in Glastonbury’s Healing Field (‘Who are we? We’re who we are. Riding on this great big star’). But this second single from Are You Gonna Go My Way achieves classic status with a blissed-out chorus worthy of ‘Strawberry Fields’-era Beatles, and a spiralling, heaven-sent guitar solo that will cleanse your soul this summer.
9. ‘Fields Of Joy’
(Mama Said, 1991)
The mellow acoustic lick and reedy acid-trip organ were a slow start to Kravitz’s make-or-break second album. But ‘Fields Of Joy’ (a cover of The New York Rock Ensemble’s 1971 release) lifts off in the chorus with its spanky funk riffing and waterfall of vocal harmonies. By the time Kravitz’s old high-school buddy Slash swings by for a one-take stunt-guitar solo, the best record of his career was up and running – and you’d have bet your house on him blowing up.
8. ‘Rock And Roll Is Dead’
(Circus, 1995)
If you’re going to call a song ‘Rock And Roll Is Dead’ – and want people to understand the title is meant ironically – then you’d better make sure it’s an absolute banger. Mission accomplished with Kravitz’s opener on Circus. The skanking riff is the best guitar hook that Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page never wrote – while that instantly addictive chorus would have got everywhere in ’95 if we weren’t all obsessed with Britpop and pretending to be cockney chimneysweeps.
7. ‘American Woman’
(Single, 1999)
The Guess Who might have written ‘American Woman’ back in 1970, but it took Lenny Kravitz to make the song swing. Slowing the tempo to a molten strut – and opening with a guttural ‘ugh!’ that the Canadians couldn’t have pulled off – its raunchy push ‘n’ pull deserved a better showcase than the soundtrack of 1999’s Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Expect your girlfriend to be drawn toward the stage, as if by a tractor beam, when he plays it this summer.
6. ‘Strut’
(Strut, 2014)
There was always a splash of Prince in Kravitz’s playbook – the New Yorker considered the Purple One a mentor and foundational influence – and it bubbled up thrillingly on a funk-rocker so pumped with confidence that its feet barely touch the sidewalk. Even the arms-folded-at-the-back brigade won’t be able to resist joining in with the gang-chant chorus at Gunnersbury Park, and it’s all going to kick off when Kravitz drops the line: “This is the chance to go berserk, baby…!”
5. ‘Again’
(Greatest Hits, 2000)
Let’s be honest: bonus tracks on Greatest Hits compilations are usually rubbish; thrown in by cynical, cigar-chomping record execs to rip off the completists. ‘Again’ is the golden exception: a gorgeous, glowing ballad so popular that Kravitz wound up releasing it as a single, gifting him a restorative US No.4 chart smash and Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance. When he finishes playing it this summer, you’ll be shouting at the stage like a manic Teletubby: “Again! Again!”
4. Fly Away
(5, 1998)
Almost everything about Kravitz’s 1998 mega-hit was accidental: he wrote it while testing a new amp (“Next thing I knew, I was telling the engineer to hook up the mics and record”) and wasn’t planning to include it on the already-submitted 5 album (“But my friend said, if I didn’t, they were gonna be so pissed off at me”). Perhaps that explains why the ‘Fly Away’ lyric has a rush-written, nursery-rhyme quality (‘I wish that I could fly/Into the sky/So very high’). But when Kravitz strikes up that trash-can guitar groove, you couldn’t stay still if you tried.
3. ‘It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over’
(Mama Said, 1991)
If you didn’t know better, and someone told you this Mama Said highlight was a great lost ’60s single by one of the all-time soul giants, you’d totally believe them. It’s insane to think that twenty-something Kravitz was capable of a ballad this beautiful and mature, overseeing every last detail from the swoop of strings to the sweetly struck guitar solo.
2. ‘Always On The Run’
(Mama Said, 1991)
Co-written by Slash and offered to Guns N’ Roses (until it became clear that then drummer Steven Adler couldn’t drive the train), that combustible dirty-funk lick morphed into a Lenny Kravitz song over the course of a vodka-fuelled day in New York (“I played drums, Slash played guitar, then he got on a plane the next morning…”). Back in ’91, ‘Always On The Run’ was the first undeniable classic in his catalogue; 35 years later, it still feels red-hot and alive in the speakers.
1. ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way’
(Are You Gonna Go My Way, 1993)
It’s a rhetorical question, of course. You’re obviously gonna go his way, lured Pied Piper-style by hands-down the greatest funk-rock single of the past 33 years. The genesis of Kravitz’s signature tune was simple enough, the stoned songwriter scribbling the lyric on a Chinese takeaway bag in his New York loft apartment, hours after sideman/co-writer Craig Ross hit on the riff at New Jersey’s Waterfront Studios. But ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way’ proved a smash that ate the planet and will spark a mass headbang this summer.
