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 heat without dumping 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 flex. Live opens with a punch; Little Girl’s Eyes and Can We Find a Reason? slow the tempo without losing weight. Electronic toppings sit on top of analog grit, so the record does not sound like a pure 1960s costume piece even when the guitars nod 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.
After the commercial, but not artistic, downdraft of his previous album, Circus, Lenny Kravitz came back in full force on 1998’s 5.
(Apple Music editorial note on 5)
Touring behind the album put Fly Away in arenas and festival fields across Europe and the US. The song became a sports-arena staple and a karaoke default; that afterlife often overshadows deeper cuts that still reward a full listen. American Woman earned Kravitz another Best Male Rock Vocal Grammy, tying the reissue era to the same cycle of awards and soundtrack synergy.
Place 5 between Are You Gonna Go My Way and the 2000 Greatest Hits package and the arc is clear: classic-rock vocabulary, modern programming accents, and singles engineered for both rock and pop formats. It is not his most underground record; it is the one that made the widest rooms sing along on cue.
Press play on Fly Away if you need the headline. Stay for Black Velveteen and I Belong to You if you want the album’s real balance of grit and polish. 5 still does the job it was built for in 1998: get Lenny Kravitz back on the radio without sanding off the amp.
By the Greatest Hits campaign in 2000, half the living-room recognition for Kravitz still traced back to this album cycle and its two Grammy-winning singles.
