Katie Smith

“There was nothing fake about Lisa. The more I thought about my made-up name, the phonier it felt to me. I wasn’t Romeo. I wasn’t Blue. I wasn’t some fabricated wannabe. I was a musician dead set on being real. It suddenly became clear that my pseudonym was getting in the way of that. It was the immature me looking to be cool. But coolness comes from within. You can’t fake it. You can’t name it into being. You have to grow it organically. I had a lot invested in Romeo Blue. I thought of him as an alter ego, without any of the problems facing Lennie. When I first came up with this new identity, it gave me confidence. But now it felt false. Romeo Blue was out. But what name was in? At first, I thought I’d go to the other extreme and call myself Leonard Kravitzky (my grandfather’s real last name before he hit Ellis Island); I actually ordered business cards carrying that name. Looking at them, though, I felt it was just too classical, like “Igor Stravinsky.” No, the easiest answer was the simplest: the real me, the real name. The only change was in the spelling: “Lennie” became “Lenny” because, on paper, I liked the shape of the y more than the ie. It looked stronger. I was Lenny Kravitz. Despite the name I’d invented and the image I’d adopted, I’d always been Lenny Kravitz. But it took Lisa to inspire me to find myself.”
― Lenny Kravitz, Let Love Rule