‘What’s wrong with people?” Lenny Kravitz wonders, when asked about the bad reviews he has had. “They talk shit: that’s OK.” The 53-year-old, whose success in soulful, funk-laced rock’n’roll has earned 40m album sales and four Grammys, is in a hangar at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, strutting in alligator boots to the sound of his band riffing Always on the Run. Today, he splits his time between the French capital and the Bahamas. You can see why the bad reviews don’t hurt. “This has been my city since I got here in ’89,” he says. “In the 90s, I had a French girlfriend here. You know Vanessa Paradis?”

Kravitz has always existed centrally in the Venn diagram of music, fashion and celebrity, but is laying low here while preparing a tour for his forthcoming 11th album, Raise Vibration (he plays Manchester, Birmingham and London in June). Building a set list is easy, he says, but selecting his defining tracks is not. “I’m not good at favourites,” he says behind yellow shades. “They all have an origin. And sometimes you look back and think: ‘Ugh, I was pretty goofy there.’”

Let Love Rule (1989)

Even as a toddler, Kravitz was musical. He would bang on utensils in the kitchen and learned to play piano, guitar and drums while growing up in New York City. His family relocated to Los Angeles when his mother, Roxie Roker, landed a role in the sitcom The Jeffersons. He graduated straight from Beverly Hills high school to life as a session musician. “I was the guy you hired to make your demos,” he says. “I did whatever I had to do to survive.”

In 1987, he eloped to Las Vegas with the actor Lisa Bonet, then known from The Cosby Show. A year later, their daughter, Zoë Kravitz, was born (she is now a successful actor in her own right). They rented a Broome Street loft in New York from a guy who used to play with Bob Marley. “It was still grungy there,” he recalls. “Artists were squatting; people were held up [at] knifepoint.” The raw, hippy guitar songs that formed his debut album poured out of him amid that bohemian life. With no label, he recorded them in a cheap studio in Hoboken, New Jersey. He got out of the elevator in his apartment building after a session one day and wrote: “Let love rule,” on the wall. “It was just something I thought,” he says. “After passing it every day, I walked into the apartment and grabbed a guitar. Out came the song.”

With a full album done, Kravitz couldn’t get a deal. “These labels didn’t understand what I was doing,” he says. Until one day an A&R at Virgin offered a five-minute meeting. “I popped in the cassette. She sat down, looked at me, [said]: ‘I’ll be right back.’” Then the label’s president walked in and told Kravitz he was “Prince meets John Lennon”, and offered to sign him. Other labels got wind of this and upped the ante. “Warner offered me way more,” he laughs. “But I knew Virgin would let me develop. I don’t care if you’re Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin, you need to develop.”

It Ain’t Over ’Til It’s Over (1991)

For a music lover as passionate as Kravitz, it is apt that his development came supporting three greats on the road: Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and David Bowie. The latter he opened for at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on his birthday. “I was green,” he smiles. Dylan called him out to play Maggie’s Farm one night, too. “I was scared shitless. I didn’t know the words.” After a headline tour of his own, he co-wrote the 1990 single Justify My Love for Madonna – his first No 1. The video was banned, a songwriting lawsuit over the lyrics ensued – poet-actor Ingrid Chavez was later added to the credits – and rumours flew that he was having an affair with the pop queen. “There was no affair,” Kravitz insists. Bonet and Kravitz’s relationship was already on the rocks, with an amicable divorce completed in 1993. “I was in not just a depression, but a fog. I didn’t know which way was up.”

I was trying to get my wife back with that song – but I wanted to stay underground and give it to Smokey Robinson Lenny Kravitz on It Ain't Over Til It's Over

Still living in Broome Street, Kravitz wrote his second album, Mama Said. The single It Ain’t Over …, though, came to him in an LA hotel room on a Fender Rhodes piano he had had delivered. “I was trying to get my wife back with that song.” Returning to New York, he turned the album in, but wanted to keep this track off it. “I said: ‘I’m not putting that song on ’cos it’s a hit.’ I wanted to stay underground and give it to Smokey Robinson.”

Eventually, he was talked round. The song’s smooth funk highlighted his Motown schooling and featured sitar and horns from Earth, Wind & Fire’s own Phenix Horns. It reached No 2 in the US chart. “That was the first time I’d walk the streets in New York hearing my song come out of people’s cars. The video was everywhere. I had to stop taking the subway. It fucked up my commute.”

Are You Gonna Go My Way? (1993)

With his life changing beyond recognition, Kravitz was working on Paradis’s album and his own follow-up. Are You Gonna Go My Way? – the title track – is a straight-up rock anthem, laced-in licks and raucous vocals. It would become his biggest smash, and an ubiquitous 90s soundtrack. “It won’t go away,” he says. Back then, Kravitz had no idea of its potential. “It was Chinese compared with what was on the radio. Foreign!”

The riff came as he and guitarist Craig Ross were mucking about while Paradis was en route to her session. “I couldn’t be disrespecting her time while I was fucking around with my music. So we cut it in five minutes. Boom.” Not knowing what to do with it, he listened to the riff on repeat. “I grabbed a brown paper bag, wrote the lyrics and sung it the next day. I knew it was cool. But a hit song? Forget it.”

Lenny Kravitz performing in 2017. Photograph: Mathieu Bitton

The song is written from the perspective of another rock star. “I was writing about Jesus Christ,” says Kravitz, repeating the lyrics: “I was born long ago / I am the chosen / I’m the one.” The video of Kravitz flinging his dreads around on the stage was directed by the acclaimed film-maker Mark Romanek; Spike Jonze, then an unknown, was the photographer. “The guys who put that shit together were all geniuses,” he says. Kravitz’s drummer, Cindy Blackman, had also just been hired. “I threw that afro wig on her. Wow. Spectacular! The visual, the song, the time. It was a perfect storm.”

Can’t Get You Off My Mind (1995)

While Kravitz’s dreams were coming true, his mother had been diagnosed with cancer and she died in 1995. His experimental fourth album, Circus, was consumed by celebrity-related woes. “My life was all over the place,” he says. “Your mother leaves the planet, you’re dealing with these newfound trappings of fame. I had to change my personality. I’m an open person: unity, peace and love! But people take your kindness for weakness.”

The song is a heart-rending ballad to a girl he was dating. He dreamed it while staying at New York’s Royalton hotel; given its hues, the working title was The Country Song. “That’s the first time that kind of sound came out,” he says. The album was also his first experience with computer-programmed production. “I was using it as a spice.” It gave him his first Top 10 LP in the US, and a No 5 in the UK. But his mother’s death deeply affected him, and it wasn’t until his fifth record – 5 – that he would be ready to dedicate a song to her.

Thinking of You (1998)

In the late 90s, Kravitz was riding high on more belters: Fly Away, I Belong to You and his cover of American Woman, which featured on the soundtrack of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Thinking of You was a slinky grooving highlight on 5 and something of an answer to Always on the Run, his 1991 signature theme, that began: “My mama said that your life is a gift.”

He reflects on that connection. “My mum had great expectations for me,” he says. “Success was about being a quality person, having integrity.” At the age of 33, he took a good look at himself. Had he kept his head amid his period of superstardom? “I was always on the run,” he says. “I didn’t have time, I was crazy. Now I was asking: OK who am I? Am I my mother’s son?” On a superficial level, he changed his look, shedding the dreads. That was Bonet’s doing. “I went up to her house in Topanga. She said: ‘You need to cut your hair – it’s time for a change of energy.’ Then she pulled out the razor blade.”

I’ll Be Waiting (2008)

In the 10 years after 5, Kravitz released the mainstream Lenny and the funk-oriented Baptism, one of his weakest. Relentless in his music-making, he would return with his best-reviewed album in years: It’s Time for a Love Revolution. Kravitz had a new studio at the Edison hotel in Times Square. By “studio”, he means a full-sized ballroom. “That was a good time,” he smiles. “That song has one of my best bridges.”

Based around a piano melody, it is a sombre rumination on unrequited love, to this day one of his most steadfast crowd-pleasers. “There’s always somebody waiting for somebody else to get their shit together,” he says.

Push (2011)

On the night of Barack Obama’s first election win, Kravitz was in “some cold-ass city” in Canada. For his ninth album, Black and White America, Kravitz responded, with politically minded classic R&B. The cover features him as a young boy, the child of an interracial couple who got together during the civil rights movement. Push is a Beatles-esque, horns-driven number about positivity in spite of hardship, inspired by his family’s struggles for acceptance. “I was in shock that I had lived to see an African American president. I never thought I’d see that. Never.”

It’s Enough (2018)

Raise Vibration – Kravitz’s new album – is his first written entirely from songs he dreamed. Its release has been preceded by the singles It’s Enough, featuring a seven-minute trumpet solo, and Low, featuring Michael Jackson. “A lot of people say: ‘Oh, you’re doing that Michael Jackson impersonation.’ No, that’s him.” Kravitz and Jackson had worked together on (I Can’t Make It) Another Day – which was released after Jackson’s death. After Kravitz came up with this Off the Wall-style number, he remembered there were still some ad-libs from their studio time together kicking around, and he incorporated them. It’s a full circle moment for Kravitz whose first ever concert was the Jackson 5 at Madison Square Garden. “He’s the person who made it happen for me. He loved [us] working together. He asked me to push him. I did.”

Michael Jackson loved us working together – he asked me to push him Lenny Kravitz

Elsewhere, the record is politicised. It’s Enough – a Curtis Mayfield-esque groove about the Middle East, environmentalism and war – was originally a Ramones-y punk track. His daughter Zoë heard it and told him it wasn’t working. “She was right. I made it smooth, whispered. It made it more powerful.” For Kravitz, still the flower child, it’s a call to action to get people looking for change. That’s what concerns him the most, not the jokes about the giant scarf he was memorably papped wearing in 2012, or the time the crotch of his trousers split on stage, or those snooty critics he has so little time for. “As my grandmother Bessie used to say: ‘You wanna know me? Come live with me.’”

Lenny Kravitz plays O2 Apollo, Manchester, on 19 June; Arena Birmingham, on 20 June and SSE Wembley Arena, London, on 22 June. Raise Vibration is released on 7 September

Lenny Kravitz has curated a longer primer to his work, featuring the above alongside other favourite tracks from across his career; you can listen and subscribe to it in Spotify below