May 1993: second Are You Gonna Go My Way single, Gondry’s 2001 homage
Believe is the second single from Lenny Kravitz’s 1993 album Are You Gonna Go My Way, released 10 May 1993 on Virgin. Kravitz wrote it with longtime engineer and co-conspirator Henry Hirsch and produced it himself. The album cut runs near five minutes: mid-tempo rock with stacked vocals, guitar grit, and a chorus that repeats the title until it feels like a mantra rather than a slogan.
Where the title track asked a crowd to follow, Believe turns inward. The lyric pushes self-trust and faith without soft-focus gospel pastiche. Hirsch’s studio fingerprints sit in the dry rooms and layered voices; Kravitz keeps the arrangement lean enough for rock radio and wide enough for the video’s sci-fi scale.
Michel Gondry directed the promo with visual effects from BUF Compagnie. The clip openly echoes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: white corridors, floating frames, Kravitz moving through a designed future. It was one of Gondry’s early high-profile music videos and fixed the song’s identity as much as radio did. On the Hot 100 it peaked at No. 60 in the US, but landed harder abroad: No. 1 in Iceland, top ten in Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
If you want it, you got to believe.
(Hook lyric, Believe, Are You Gonna Go My Way, Virgin, 1993)
As a commercial single it was the first from the album to chart in the United States, even if the title track owned rock formats first. Live, Believe gave Kravitz a slower burn between the riff hits. Decades later the Gondry images still travel further than the chart numbers.
Return to the Virgin mix and the stacked vocals still hold the centre. Beside Are You Gonna Go My Way and Heaven Help, Believe is the album’s quiet insistence: less swagger, more stance, and a French director’s Kubrick mirror around it.
