“Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz

"Fly Away" came off 5, Lenny Kravitz's fifth album, in 1998 as the record's fourth single, and it's a one-man show in the most literal sense: Kravitz wrote it, produced it, sang every vocal and played the guitar, bass and drums himself, with Terry Manning engineering and mixing.

What he made is a tight, ecstatic little blast of riff rock, all strut and sunshine, the sort of thing that sounds like it was thrown together in an afternoon and is all the better for it. It gets in, lifts off and lands before you've had time to think about it, which is exactly the point.

The song reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and went all the way to the top in the United Kingdom and Iceland, with top-10 placings in Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. It also won Kravitz the Grammy for Best Male Rock Performance in 1999.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.