Lenny Kravitz released Lenny on October 30, 2001, through Virgin Records. His sixth studio album arrived with “Dig In” as its lead single and Kravitz handling production alongside much of the playing. Its guitar hooks were immediate, but the record also made room for spiritual searching, romantic uncertainty and a pointed response to something that had happened to him offstage.
The album followed a stretch that had put several different sides of Kravitz on the radio. “Fly Away” emerged from 5, his 1998 studio album, followed by his cover of “American Woman” and the new song “Again” on his 2000 Greatest Hits collection. By the time he returned with another full album of original material, each of those three recordings had earned him a Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance.
On Lenny, his involvement extended well beyond singing and writing. He played electric and acoustic guitars, bass, drums and keyboards, with additional credits for programming and arrangements. That gave him control over both the foundation of a song and the details layered above it. There were collaborators, too. Craig Ross co-wrote “If I Could Fall in Love” and “Stillness of Heart” and contributed guitar to several tracks. Henry Hirsch co-wrote “Believe in Me,” engineered the album and shared mixing duties with Kravitz. The compact creative team left plenty of room for Kravitz to move between instruments without making every arrangement identical.
“Dig In” and “If I Could Fall in Love” leaned on electric guitars and direct melodies, while “Believe in Me” and “You Were in My Heart” explored different textures. In his contemporary Slant review, Sal Cinquemani singled out the synthesizers and strings in “You Were in My Heart.” Alongside those arrangements, “God Save Us All” and “Stillness of Heart” kept questions of faith and inner satisfaction in the writing. The album’s range came through in those choices, without requiring a parade of guest singers.
“Bank Robber Man” had a much more specific origin. In a 2018 Rolling Stone interview, Kravitz recalled being out jogging when police stopped him at gunpoint after a nearby bank robbery. He said the description was a Black man in a T-shirt, and officers held him until a witness said he wasn’t the robber. Kravitz described the encounter as racial profiling and said he went directly into the studio afterward. “I was fucking pissed off,” he told the magazine. That experience gave the track’s aggression a concrete source: he was writing about being treated as a suspect himself.
The album’s lead single produced a different kind of consequence. “Dig In” won Best Male Rock Vocal Performance at the 2002 Grammys, extending the sequence begun by “Fly Away” in 1999 and continued by “American Woman” in 2000 and “Again” in 2001. Four recordings, four consecutive ceremonies, the same category.
The recognition for Lenny extended beyond that initial single. “If I Could Fall in Love,” one of the album’s Kravitz–Ross collaborations, earned another Best Male Rock Vocal Performance nomination at the 2004 Grammys.
