Kravitz is taking on a new label

Given the depressed state of the music business, why would anyone with a history inside that world want to start a label?

Ask Lenny Kravitz.

The veteran musician, who turns 40 on Wednesday, has struck a deal with Warner Bros. Records to launch a joint-venture label, Roxie Records. Named for Kravitz’s mother, actress Roxie Roker (who died in 1995 from breast cancer), the company will operate from his Miami home and will debut with “... Of What Lies Beneath,” the Kravitz-produced debut album from Texas pop-rock artist Dan Dyer, due this summer.

A second album, also produced and written largely by Kravitz, is in the works with Sarah Killer, a young Swiss woman with no previous singing experience but whose speaking voice intrigued Kravitz when the two met through friends last year.

“I still believe in music and love music,” says Kravitz. “It’s my life. It may not be selling like it used to, and the business may be falling apart. But I used to play music for free.”

Of course, the folks at Warner Bros. believe that Kravitz can make some money for them. The deal was arranged through Warner chairman Tom Whalley and vice chairman Jeff Ayeroff, who, in a previous role as founding co-chairman of Virgin Records America, signed Kravitz to his first record deal in the late ‘80s. Given that Kravitz still records for Virgin (he just released his seventh album, “Baptism,” and his deal with the company runs for two more albums, he says), this is not merely a deal designed to flatter a star.

“This isn’t like a vanity thing for an artist, not a deal you do to keep an artist on your label happy,” says Ayeroff. “We did this because he’s a source of A&R; and a good producer.”

Warner Bros. actually has shied in recent years from setting up labels with artists, and, in fact, is embroiled in bitter legal tussles with the most prominent one, Madonna’s Maverick Records, home to Alanis Morissette and Michelle Branch. Unlike with Maverick, the goals and financial commitment to Roxie are fairly modest. Plans are for the label to release just two or three albums a year.

As for Kravitz’s A&R; role, he defers to a higher authority.

“God is my A&R; man,” he says. “The two people I signed and am working with just came into my life. I didn’t look. I let God do the work. That might sound esoteric, but that’s the way it is.”

Ayeroff sees the image of another figure who has had a big impact on the music world, if not quite at the deity level.

“Maybe he can be a rock Quincy Jones,” Ayeroff says, noting Kravitz’s writing and production work with such luminaries as Madonna and Mick Jagger, as well as French star Vanessa Paradis. “He has that versatility.”

Kravitz likes that idea.

“I was just with Quincy in Rome,” he says. “He’s a great inspiration. Producing is something I feel I do very well. If you listen to things I produced, you can’t tell who produced it, and that’s the key to me.”

Mayer’s column: a wonderland?

Anyone who’s watched the celebrity guest judges on “American Idol” would have the impression that musicians make for timid critics. John Mayer hopes to change that image. He’s just started writing a monthly column for Esquire. Having been named the magazine’s cultural advisor, Mayer will tackle a variety of topics with what we hope is a tongue-in-cheek title, “The Resident Rock Star.”

Mayer starts off a bit easy, focusing his first entry on praising the debut album from young New York singer-songwriter Nellie McKay -- who just happens to be on the same label he is, Columbia Records. But he says that’s mere happenstance, and he is willing to bite the hand that feeds him, and says in the second column he’ll be challenging some business strategies of Columbia’s parent company, Sony Music.

“The next column I take my label down a rung,” says Mayer, who credits Columbia publicist Angelica Cob Baehler for approaching Esquire with the column idea after the musician casually mentioned it one day. “It’s about moving forward, about how to change the music business. If you’re a music company that sells both CD-Rs and CDs, you have a conflict of interest. This really only pertains to Columbia.”

Mayer isn’t all hugs and kisses for fellow musicians in the current inaugural column. He criticizes such touted rock acts as Jet and the White Stripes for backward-looking musical approaches, while praising such rappers as Kanye West for pulling hip-hop’s “wheels out of the mud” and moving the form ahead. And he’s already taking flak for admitting that the Beatles aren’t that big a deal in his musical world.

Honor Osbourne with a just dessert

We’ll overlook the propriety of honoring Ozzy Osbourne with an ice-cream flavor that involves liqueur, given his history of substance abuse. But carrot cake? That’s what the small Country Cow Creamery in Woodbridge, N.J., has come up with in homage to Ozzy.

What kind of flavor is that for the Dark Lord of Rock? OK, it’s called Carnivorous Carrot Cake (cinnamon spice with bits of carrot cake soaked in hazelnut liqueur). But it’s still carrot cake. It wouldn’t have been hard to come up with something more fitting.

Let’s just start with bat. It wouldn’t have to be real bat, but just something that evoked bat. Or maybe a bat-dove parfait.

How about a “Speak of the Devil” -- devil’s-food cake with hot habanera sauce coated with ice cream? The sales-pitch line could be “Tastes like hell . . . frozen over!”

Other Osbourne titles are naturals as well: “Diary of a Madman” could become “Dairy of a Madman” (served only to those who are lactose intolerant, perhaps) and “Blizzard of Ozz” is a ready-made (unless Dairy Queen’s lawyers come calling).

There could also be a tribute to Osbourne’s former lead guitarist, who died in a plane crash in 1982 -- Rocky Randy Rhoads.

We’ve got no problem at all with the concoction Country Cow has come up with for Osbourne’s notoriously tough wife, though. With dark chocolate ice cream, dark chocolate fudge and brownie bits soaked in Godiva liqueur, it’s called Death by Sharon.