“IT’S A BEAUTIFUL THING TO REALLY REALISE WHAT YOU DON’T NEED”
ONE THING LENNY KRAVITZ HAS BEEN TRYING TO TELL US ALL ALONG IS THAT ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE – A BETTER WORLD, A WORLD GUIDED BY LOVE AND NOT BY FEAR, WHERE PEOPLE CHOOSE UNITY AND PEACE OVER DIVISION AND SELF-DESTRUCTION.
In a world more like that one, the past few years might have gone very differently for almost everyone, including Lenny Kravitz. He might have spent autumn and winter 2020 as he’d originally intended, playing a run of concerts here in Australia and New Zealand and then everywhere from Lithuania to Lisbon, in support of his 2018 album, Raise Vibration, a record that, like most Lenny Kravitz albums, seems to summon gyrating supermodels out of thin air every time you play it, an album that opens – as his recent shows usually have – with Lenny singing the Prince-goes-to-“Kashmir” anthem “We Can Get It All Together”, asking to be delivered from his loneliness and selfishness and brokenness so that he can join hands with the rest of humankind.
Instead, in early March 2020, as the spread of COVID-19 picked up speed, Kravitz left his house in Paris and caught a flight to the Bahamas, thinking he’d hang out at his place on the island of Eleuthera for a few days until things went back to normal. His tour luggage had already been shipped to Australia; he landed in the islands with a few pairs of jeans in a weekend bag. “And I’ve been living out of this weekend bag,” Kravitz says when we speak, “for almost five and a half months.”
In Eleuthera, in the one-room house he finally got around to putting up after sleeping on the beach in an Airstream for years, he is alone, except for Leroy and Jojo, the potcake dogs – Caribbean mutts, both adopted off the street, boon companions even though they don’t talk (although at this point, Kravitz says, “I’ve
