Cree Summer just appealed to the male ego to get Lenny Kravitz to duet with her on the bluesy "Mean Sleep" off her debut solo album, Street Faerie. The singer-songwriter with the funky rasp and earthy poetry met Kravitz 11 years ago when she played Freddie Brooks on the hit television show A Different World and he was married to her co-star Lisa Bonet.

The 29-year-old Summer, who grew up in Toronto but has lived in Los Angeles the past decade, wrote the song just before she went to Nassau where Kravitz produced the album. She didn't have the audacity to assume he would sing it with her, so instead, she told him they should fly someone in to do it.

"I think on some unconscious level I was baiting him because I did say, 'There's one rule I got, Lenny. The voice of this guy has got to be real masculine. I don't want no mamby pamby sugar-pansy voice. I want a real man's voice.' and What's he gonna say? "He said, 'Well I think I should sing that," she laughs.

Another song on the album, the spirited "Miss Moon", was co-written with Kravitz and inspired by Bonet who was down in Nassau with them for the entire two months they recorded.

"We drove jeep out to the beach, put on the fog lights and blasted the music. It was a full moon. She jumped out of the jeep and dance for us," recounts Summer. "We were both (menstrual) cycling and I got all inspired lyrically and he got all inspired musically and we wrote this sweet song.

"I thought it would be nice too to have this song written about this part of being a woman that's so often made to us to be a curse, when this is the great discerning factor that makes us women, and gives us the power to decide when life comes unto this earth. This is a part of our magic, not something to be embarrassed by, (but) something to celebrate."

Sometimes Summer speaks like a natural poet, with beauty and insight and rhythm, then she'll punctuate the next sentence with expletive like "motherf**k." She is lively and headstrong and passionate, it seems, a product of an actor/musician father, Canadian Don Francks, and dancer mother. She has a younger brother, Rainbow.

She was born in California, but spent her formative years on Red Pheasant, a Plains Cree reserve in Saskatchewan where her parents were married and Francks built his family a house out of mud, grass and wood. The home survived six Canadian winters. "I danced pow wow, I rode horses, I had lots of friends," Summer recalls of that time.

When the government discovered a non-Native family was living on the reserve tax-free, they relocated to Toronto. Through her father, Summer began doing cartoon voice-over work like Inspector Gadget. At 13, she joined her first band and by 16 had dropped out of the Toronto High School For The Performing Arts. She gigged in all the local clubs, the Bamboo, Lee's Palace, the Rivoli, with such acts as The Maxx and Mystique, the R&B band Deborah Cox would later join.

"In our minds, it was a career. We thought we were big shots," she laughs, although they never shopped for a record deal.

It wasn't until she relocated to Los Angeles at age 18 that she truly began to pursue a music career. Lured to Hollywood by "that whole propaganda fantasy -- go there and be a rock star", she knew she could support herself by doing voice-overs for American animation houses. And she did, including the characters Elmira from Elmira & Pinky & The Brain, Suzy from Rugrats and the affected lady peanut of the M&M candy commercials. She then landed a role on A Different World, but continued music.

When her rock band Subject To Change got a deal with Capitol, she made a record called Womb Amnesia, and toured with Gin Blossoms and Fishbone. Then a new CEO took over the label and the band was dropped, the record never released, and the band broke up two months later. "That was a heartbreak," she says. "It's hard enough to break up with one dude. Imagine six."

In many ways, it was a blessing, she feels, in retrospect. She says she sounded like "a ranting chipmunk" on the album. Disillusioned, it took a year away from music to get back into it for "art's sake." She started writing again and gigging in LA under her own name and labels started coming out. She eventually signed with Work Group, home to Canadian acts Esthero and Len.

"I wouldn't trade that experience for anything," she says of her training ground with Capitol. "On one level, I know my way around the studio. I know how to tour. I know how to work a band. I was the songwriter for that band, so it really got me to hone my skills, and on the other level, it was a good heartbreak, because I was I was in my early twenties. I had expectations to be this great rock star.

"And so to get your heart broken and fall on your face, you tell all your friends you've got a record coming out and then nothing, that was a real public crash. So I got to play music just to play music, and I started gigging again, not looking for a deal, and feeling satisfied and feeling good, and that was a great experience. So now I feel like I'm a success already. I got it all."

Summer hits the road April 23 with Lenny Kravitz, The Black Crowes and Everlast. She'll then play the festivals in Europe, before joining some Lilith Fair dates back in North America.