It’s natural to think that one of music’s most legendary artists, approaching his fourth decade in music, Lenny Kravitz has seen and done it all, got the t-shirt, and has earned enough stripes to tell the rest of the world how it goes. But at age 59, the rockstar still feels he has much more to learn.
“I’m still the student,” Kravitz tells ESSENCE just ahead of the release of his feel-good second single, “Human.”
“It’s important to remain the student. I watched my grandfather [Albert Roker], who was an amazing man. In his nineties, I was just watching him continually learn, continually hang out with different people, younger people, and always remain open,” he explained. “A lot of senior folk think they know everything. ‘This is the way it is,’ and think ‘I’m older, so I’m telling you how it’s done.’ He had the opposite attitude. So he was a good teacher to show me that it’s so important to remain a student for all of your days.”
Forever a student of life and his surroundings, Kravitz took the global COVID pandemic, a time that effectively sat the world down, as an opportunity to reflect on the energy that has sustained him through all of life’s storms, eventually channeling that into what became his 12th studio album, Blue Electric Light.
Amping up for a post-pandemic return to the limelight – his 2020 Here to Love Tour was cut short by worldwide quarantine protocols – Kravitz is feeling better than he ever has. Few artists, from any genre, are able to maintain a sense of current relevance across decades the way the rocker has. Constantly at the forefront of style, always on both the big and small screens, and with his music providing a constant soundtrack to the lives of Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z rock fans, Kravitz has only grown more fervent in his zest for creation with each passing year….
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