5 – Fly Away, Compass Point, then American Woman

Virgin, Compass Point, Fly Away

5 arrived on 12 May 1998 as Lenny Kravitz’s fifth studio album on Virgin. He produced, arranged, and largely performed the record himself. Sessions ran from October 1997 into February 1998 at Ghetto Lounge Studios and Compass Point Studios. After Circus (1995) cooled commercially, the brief was to restore radio play without dropping the vintage guitar, bass, and drum values that built his name.

Early singles If You Can’t Say No, Thinking of You, and I Belong to You kept him visible. Then Fly Away, released in November 1998, changed the scale: UK Singles Chart No. 1, US Hot 100 Top 15, and a grainy Paul Hunter club video in heavy MTV rotation. Kravitz later won the Grammy for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the track. The 1999 reissue added American Woman, his Guess Who cover from the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me soundtrack, plus the B-side Without You, stretching the album toward fifteen songs.

Sonically 5 mixes funk rock, psychedelic soul, and late-90s loops. Black Velveteen and Supersoulfighter show the multi-instrumentalist at work. Live opens hard; Little Girl’s Eyes and Can We Find a Reason? slow the tempo without losing weight. Electronic parts sit on top of analog grit, so the record does not sound like a pure 1960s period piece even when the guitars point that way.

Virgin pushed the album across rock and adult-contemporary formats at once. That dual path explains why I Belong to You and Fly Away could share a campaign without confusing radio bookers. Engineers at Compass Point captured room and punch; Kravitz’s overdubs kept the center of the stereo image locked on his voice and guitar even when loops thicken the sides.