Deep joy

Interview, July, 1998 by Tracey Pepper

TP: But some of the most beautiful songs ever written express sadness and pain.

LK: Of course. But there should be a balance - a way out of it instead of just wallowing.

TP: Your new record is a lot less religiously fixated than the last one.

LK: Year, but God is always in my life, and that's the most important thing to me. The last record had a lot of songs that called out to God because I was in a desperate state. It came out very heavy.

TP: Do you think people resisted Circus because of Its religious overtones?

LK: Oh yeah. And after Are You Gonna Go My Way, there were such high expectations.

TP: People always want you to remake your last successful album.

LK: They do. It's like, If we could just get one more like that. No. I did that.

TP: There's something pathetic about trying to recreate past glory. Artists should move forward and challenge themselves.

LK: Exactly. So I felt no pressure. I'm sure the record company did, but I felt absolutely no pressure to beat the last one.

TP: Critics have called your music derivative. I do think some of the songs have a familiarity about them. How do you respond to that criticism?

LK: I write my own songs. I've never taken a bar of music from anybody or taken their words or melodies. But I do write in a classic sort of sense.

TP: Maybe that's what it is.

LK: And that's all it is. I mean, there are only so many notes. What makes something original is how you put it together. With the first album, people didn't really listen. They were like, He sounds like the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix. And I thought, Listen to what I'm doing. I am influenced by that kind of music, but I'm mixing it with gospel and blues. I have a soul voice. I'm not a white singer. I've been compared to hundreds of artists, which just goes to show you that I'm not any one thing at all. Led Zeppelin, who are now considered innovators, were told that they were the most unoriginal thing in the world - that they couldn't write, that they ripped off the blues.

TP: Do you think part of that was because they're white? Often there's an underlying implication that white people can't play the blues or have no soul.

LK: The funniest review I ever saw about myself was in The Village Voice. The first sentence was: "If Lenny Kravitz were white, he'd be the savior of rock and roll."And I understood what he was saying: If I were white, it would be bigger. I'd get less criticism.

TP: I don't know. White people playing what is traditionally thought of as black music aren't always critically respected.

LK: They don't get me, though. My name's Lenny Kravitz. I'm half Jewish, I'm half black, I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It's like, What is he doing? We don't understand where he comes from. The confusion makes people uncomfortable. They can't put their finger on me. But it doesn't matter. Nine out of ten groups that came out in '89 are gone. I'm still here.

TP: Let's go back to where you came from. You grew up in New York City and L.A. and went to school at Beverly Hills High. What was that like?