As Lenny Kravitz stood in his downtown-Manhattan hotel on Sept. 11 watching the Twin Towers fall nearby, his first thoughts were of his daughter Zoë. "She wasn't with me, thank God," says Kravitz, who shares a Miami apartment with Zoë, 12, the only child from his six-year marriage to actress Lisa Bonet. The scale of the disaster, he adds, "didn't hit me right away."

It has now. Since the attack, "certain things just aren't as important," says Kravitz, 37. Music and fatherhood, though, remain priorities. Kravitz wrote most of his sixth disc, Lenny, in "a shack" he owns in the Bahamas. "Zoë comes with me," he says. "She has issues with it"—there's no TV—"but she finds things to do, like go to the beach or climb trees." Or jam with her dad. "Guitar, bass, drums, she wants to do it all," says Kravitz. "But I'm not pushing it."

He hopes to do some nudging on the issue of police methods. Kravitz wrote the biting "Bank Robber Man," a song about his brief wrongful detainment last November in Florida. "Obviously I didn't do it. But I fit the description of a guy who robbed a bank," says Kravitz, who was leaving his gym when he was stopped. "It was a very strange situation, being handcuffed." Kravitz was released shortly after. "The racial-profiling thing is unfortunate, and it's going to get worse. When Timothy McVeigh blew up Oklahoma City, did they start stopping every white guy? It's a shame."