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By February 1993, Lenny Kravitz had already proven himself to be one of the rising stars of the decade – but the release of third album title track and lead single Are You Gonna Go My Way turned him into one of the hottest names in rock ’n’ roll.
The song was written by Kravitz with his guitar player Craig Ross. Kravitz also handled producer responsibilities, as he has on every release to date.
Are You Gonna Go My Way was created during sessions at Waterfront Studios in New Jersey, and as Kravitz explained: “I was jamming with Craig Ross, who I wrote the song with. It was one of those songs that happened in five minutes.”
He went to explain on how he could tell “there was something happening” which prompted him to ask engineer and mixer Henry Hirsch to hit record and “turn the tape machines on”.
A power trio – consisting of Kravitz on drums, Ross on guitar and Tony Breit on bass – played the song together one more time “and that was it”.
In a 2025 interview with Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett’s Shred With Shifty podcast, Craig Ross revealed more about the vintage guitar heard on the recording.
“I had an amp, and I think I had a Strat originally, and I just started playing that riff. Then he [Kravitz] goes, ‘Whoa, what’s that?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. I just started feeling that.’ And he felt it too.”
Ross continued: “So he was like, ‘Oh, cool. Well, why don’t you put on a Les Paul [Kravitz’s 1953 Goldtop conversion] and try it that way?’ And then pretty much half an hour later, we had it cut.”
That Les Paul had been purchased by Kravitz in 1992 while on tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, after he discovered that a man facing jail time was in the parking lot selling guitars to pay for legal representation.
“I went out to his car, and I probably bought five guitars that day, including this one,” Kravitz revealed to Guitar Player magazine.
The lyrics for Are You Gonna Go My Way came to Kravitz later that night, though a logistical hiccup almost prevented him from putting pen to paper.
“In 1992, I lived in a loft on Broome and Mercer,” he told Classic Rock magazine last year. “A bunch of musicians lived there, so it was kind of a mess, and I never had a proper pad and paper. So I’m listening to this track we’d cut that morning, that I’d brought home on a cassette, and I had no idea what I was gonna sing over it.”
He added: “It’s late and I’m probably stoned at the time as well, when all of a sudden I hear the song – I can hear the melody, I hear the words. But I cannot find a piece of paper to save my life!”
Thankfully an old pen and a paper bag from an Asian takeaway came to the rescue and helped him document the life-changing moment of inspiration that would end up cementing his name into legend for decades to come.
“So I’m running around the kitchen, with the boom-box playing on the counter, and I see a paper bag that someone’s brought Chinese food home in. I ripped open the bag, flattened it, and found an old pen to scribble down the words. And the words all just came out in one go. I still have that paper bag somewhere.”
Though the lyrics might initially read like a declaration of romantic interest, they actually run deeper than that – stemming back to his mother Roxie Roker’s Christian roots and his father Sy Kravitz’s Jewish background.
“I’m singing lines like ‘I was born long ago’ and ‘I am the chosen, I’m the one’, but obviously it’s not about me,” he revealed to Classic Rock. “It’s about Christ, and it’s coming from that Jesus Christ Superstar kind of place. I’m singing in role, y’know, as if it was a musical, and the question means: are you gonna go the way of love?”
The song’s main riff is based around an E Minor blues in the open position, bending up on the second fret of the G-string and then releasing, while also using the open G and D strings, as well as E note found on the second fret of the D-string and the low E.
A dyad played on the third fret of the two highest strings serves as an exclamation point for the motif, occurring at the end of every other bar outside of the verses.
To create tension, the idea is transposed up a minor third to the key of G, with Ross now positioning himself around the third and fifth frets.
In the chorus sections, a G6 chord is played using the standard triad on the D, G and B-strings with the open high E ringing – adding the major six interval to the cluster. This then shifts down to a classic A major chord and the same shape is used in the seventh, ninth and twelfth positions for D, E and G major chords respectively.
The same shapes are used, but struck in a different order with a different time feel, during the solo section. There is also a flanger added to create a late ’60s/early ’70s psychedelic effect not a million miles away from the kind of modulation Jimi Hendrix was famous for using.
Ross played the majority of his leads in the E Minor pentatonic positions at the seventh and twelfth frets, though also added some E Major ideas around the ninth and eleventh frets to create more of a Mixolydian flavour.
It is a common misconception that Kravitz performed guitars on the recording, perhaps partly because of his reputation as a multi-instrumentalist. He even admitted that “Craig is a genius” who “doesn’t get the credit he deserves”.
It was all about doing what was right for the song – and in the case of Are You Gonna Go My Way, Kravitz’s creative impulses led him to recording live.
“If I play all the instruments on a song, I’ll start with the drums and I’ll build it up,” Kravitz said. “But the way we were feeling Are You Gonna Go My Way is that I wanted the guitars and drums tracked at the same time, so I played drums, Craig played guitar and Tony Breit played bass.
“So it was one of the tracks where I had musicians. And it was beautiful – you get that rub, and you get the microphone leakage. It created that sound.”
It’s a sound would ultimately change his life and become the song he’s best known for, topping the charts in America and Australia, as well as storming top tens around the world. Not that he had even the slightest inkling things would actually end up going his way following its release.
“I had no idea that that song would become what it became,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 2018. “No idea. There was nothing on the radio like that. And the recording is so raw, it’s ridiculous.”
