Lenny Kravitz – Low

A 1999 tape, under a drum kit in 2018

On 25 May 2018, Lenny Kravitz released Low through Roxie Records and BMG. It was the second single from Raise Vibration, his eleventh studio album, which followed on 7 September 2018. He wrote the song and produced it. The album was made at Gregory Town Sound, the studio he built on Eleuthera, in the Bahamas. Craig Ross, his guitarist since the early 1990s, engineered the record. David Baron played keyboards and wrote the string and horn parts. Kravitz played most of the other instruments himself, the way he had worked since Let Love Rule.

The second voice is Michael Jackson. In 1999 the two of them worked at Marvin’s Room in Los Angeles on (I Can’t Make It) Another Day. That song came out in 2010 on Jackson’s posthumous album Michael. Kravitz still had short sung asides from those sessions, and he placed them on Low. The single runs 5 minutes and 19 seconds. On the album it is track two. The first single, It’s Enough!, had come out two weeks earlier, on 11 May 2018.

The record opens on a plain drum beat. A round bass follows, then Kravitz singing close to the microphone. Horns come in later. Jackson’s asides sit behind the chorus, short and high. The words ask a lover to stay down on the floor and keep the affair quiet. The chorus repeats "Got to keep it low." There are fewer guitars here than on the loud singles of the 1990s, such as Are You Gonna Go My Way and Fly Away.