'It's given me time to get connected': Lenny Kravitz' lockdown life in the Bahamas
Lenny Kravitz: has made a virtue of slowing things down over lockdown
Lenny Kravitz spent lockdown almost exactly as you would imagine. One of, if not, the coolest men in music left his Paris home shortly before the pandemic shut travel down and decamped to his stunning island retreat in Eleuthera, a small island in the Bahamas.
He expected to stay for just a few days before his schedule dictated a trip to the other side of the world, but that wasn’t to be. Once there, he left his usual life of touring and country hopping behind to live more slowly and have time to create.
“The pandemic was actually very nice and surreal. I was here in the Bahamas. I’ve been here now for a year and four months since the pandemic started. I got here on March 4 last year. I was in Paris shooting the YSL campaign and it was Fashion Week with all that that brings.
“Then got on a plane came here to the Bahamas to rest for a few days. I was supposed to go onto Australia and New Zealand to continue the third year of my world tour, because I’ve been on tour for two years with my album Raise Vibration. Then, while I was here, everything shut down. It’s been quite an interesting and beautiful time even though I’m not happy about the reason. The fact that I’ve been here this long has been so different for me because I haven’t stayed in one place for this amount of time since I was a very, very small child.
"Being somewhere as peaceful as this in the middle of nature really allowed me to slow the clock down, get really quiet, and get in touch with things inside of me. It’s been very interesting. It has been a very creative time, in so many aspects; writing, music, art, photography, buildings things, working in the garden. These are the things that are so beautiful and I just love being creative in many capacities. It’s given me the time to do that, to get connected.”
As things reopen and time comes for Lenny to leave his Bahamian idyll, he’s looking forward to returning to his former busy life on the road.
“I look forward to being back on stage and sharing music with people. Obviously, seeing family and people that I have not seen too but I’m really looking forward to being back playing the music and getting back on the road, and to doing what I do.
“This home [in Eleuthera] has always been where I come to do a lot of the things that I do and be creative but as I said, I’ve never spent this much time here. I look at it as a blessing because once things go back — and I hope they will go back to some normalcy, whatever that means — I may never get time like this again.”
Lenny and I are speaking because his second campaign for the Yves Saint Laurent fragrance Y is about to be released. The partnership with the iconic fashion house seems to be very collaborative and now that Lenny is part of the brand it’s very much a family affair.
His daughter, the actress Zoe Kravitz, first became a Global Ambassador for YSL Beauté in 2017, something Lenny told Forbes was thrilling for him: “That’s the beautiful part of this experience — here I am following in my daughter’s footsteps and that’s the most exciting part for me.”
The first campaign couldn’t have felt more Lenny Kravitz and the second even more so. None of this comes as a surprise given his love of the brand and the team that put it together.
“It’s been a wonderful collaboration with YSL. I have actually been a fan of the house for years because growing up my mother used to wear their clothes and fragrance and so I knew it well. When we joined together it was very easy. They showed me being myself really and it all worked out very organically.” Fragrance has always been an important part of getting ready for Lenny and it has played a role both in his normal life and artistically in his performances.
He was born and spent his early years in New York where his mother, Roxie Roker, was an actress and his father Sy Kravitz was a TV producer and jazz promoter. Fashion and music played a big part in Lenny’s life from a very young age.
“I grew up in the ‘70s with my parents and around artists. Fragrance was always a thing, starting with people’s personal fragrance like the oils or perfumes and the incense and different things being burned. Smell has always part of the vibe.
“The décor, the lighting, the scent — it was all part of the aesthetic.
“I can vividly remember my mother getting dressed when I was a child and putting her perfume on and us going out. As I say it right now to you, I can remember that smell and smell it in my brain. That’s the wonderful thing about memory. Whether it be fragrance, whether it be sound, music, or taste. You can eat something and be transported back to your grandmother’s kitchen when you were a child, or you can hear a song and be transformed back to sometime in your life that is very particular and re-live that.
“Fragrance has always been something I was aware of, even travelling. Growing up in New York City and coming out of the house and the smell of the city. It’s different than the smell of other places. It’s... very identifiable.”
Lenny’s mother was extremely glamourous and known for her personal style. Her influence on his own tastes and fashion is clear.
“As a small child, I would stand there watching her, she’d be dressed and she would be putting her makeup on and doing her hair. She wore a beautiful afro at that time, and then she would put on her perfume. It was like magic, it was like that was the smell of my mother ready for the world and stepping out. In fact, funny enough, I was talking to somebody about that a year ago about my mother, we were just talking about that. This person sent me a bottle of the perfume that my mother used to wear. I just sprayed it in the air and it was just like, “Wow,” it was incredible, it immediately took me back, took me there.”
Lenny’s personal taste in scent is eclectic and evocative of where he is in the world. As you would expect for someone who spends a lot of time on the road, he has a collection of fragrances from all over the world.
“I love mostly natural auras and I love strong things like tobacco, leather, and earth. The natural scents, and also the more delicate things like vanilla and cocoa.
“I have all kinds of different incense from Japan and different favorite things that I have been burning since a teenager. I have collections of candles and different scents, I have my go-to stuff that are my basics, but I also like to change it up all the time.”
Our time to talk comes to an end and Lenny has some more global interviews to do from his hideaway home. But after that he says he’s going back into the garden, where Instagram tells us he’s building a deck. He may have swapped the stage and his guitar for a garden and an axe but he still looks like the coolest man you’ll ever meet.
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