‘Success Is Just Doing the Work’

Deep within the hills of Southern California’s Topanga Canyon, on an estate overlooking the Santa Monica mountains where wind chimes ring softly in the breeze, Lenny Kravitz is explaining the concept of an opium bed to me. When he was living in New York in the late 1980s, working on his debut album, he didn’t have much bread, he says in his rock-star parlance, but knew he wanted his home to be an artistic sanctuary, a place that could invigorate and hold his music. It was the first…