k.d. lang: Watershed
24 January 2008
Gaydarnation.com
k.d lang's new album is released on 28 January and we, for one, can’t wait! Watershed is the first album of newly written material from the lesbian singer since 2000's Invincible Summer and her first studio album since 2004's acclaimed Canadian songbook, Hymns Of The 49th Parallel (there was also Reintarnation in 2006, but that was 'just' a compilation of some of her early tracks). What's more, it's also the first self-produced collection of her celebrated 25-year career.
We caught up with the four-time Grammy winner to find out more about singing, coming out, girlfriends, gay rights, Patsy Cline and Canada!
You must be exited about your new album, Watershed?
I’m very excited about it. I’m proud of it because it is my first self-produced record and I wrote the songs. It’s a big piece of me that I’m sending off into the world.
How long has it been since your last album?
My last album - Hymns of the 49th Parallel - was released in 2004, so it was not too long ago, but my last original album was 2000.
What was the reason for leaving a few years gap between the last album and this one?
No reason; I just didn’t get around to doing it. I’d been writing the songs on Watershed for about six years or so, interspersed with Wonderful World with Tony Bennett and Hymns of the 49th Parallel, so I’ve just been working parallel on all the records.
How do you go about writing songs?
I like to collaborate with my friends and then just sit down, mull things over and throw things back and forth until it starts to take shape.
Do lyrics and melodies just pop into your head?
Melodies do; lyrics come second for me. I write the melody first.
Watershed is a self-produced album, so presumably you made all the decisions regarding the album yourself?
I took things from conception – from the very early creative process – and kept embellishing the recordings to the point where I felt the songs and the arrangements were finished. It’s a pretty wide range of performances from the vocals to highly arranged string arrangements, so I think it’s a nice overview of the musical process.
Do you have any favourite tracks from the album?
I really like ‘I Dream of Spring’; I think it’s a beautiful song. ‘Jealous Dog’ is also one of my favourite songs because it’s so quirky. It’s just a performance that I did one morning when I was sitting around, so it’s pretty raw. But I like all the tracks for different reasons.
“It was kind of a kitsch thing for a young, gay, punk girl to do real classic country songs and to put a bit of a twist onto them.”
Do you think your music has improved over the years? Do you think you’ve improved as an artist?
I don’t know – I’ve changed, so I don’t know if ‘improved’ would be an objective word. I think that maybe I’ve evolved as a singer a little bit – my singing has matured, but I don’t know about my song writing.
You have a beautiful and quite haunting voice. When did you first discover that you had such a voice?
I started singing when I was about five years old. I was studying classical piano at the time and wasn’t doing very well at it, so my piano teacher suggested that I try singing. I’ve been singing ever since; it’s always been my focus in life.
But did you realise just how amazing a voice it is?
There was never a moment or an epiphany. I really just approach music from a music sense and not just from the singing sense. My focus has certainly shifted to the vocal aspect of it, but at the beginning it was really just about making music and performing.
One of your biggest influences was Patsy Cline, wasn’t it?
Yes, it was certainly one of the things that got me started in country music and started to solidify my professional career. I was never into country music as a kid – I was into classical music because my siblings were studying it and, on a personal level, I was listening to artists such as Linda Ronstadt, Rickie Lee Jones and Joni Mitchell. I studied music in college and I kind of opened wide up to everything.
So how did the country thing come along, then?
The country thing really sort of happened with a kitsch performance art approach – country, as we all know, comes from a more conservative background and a conservative mindset, so it was kind of a kitsch thing for a young, gay, punk girl to do real classic country songs and to put a bit of a twist onto them. I approached it with a performance art feel, but then I fell in love with the music and the essence of country music, and obviously with Patsy Cline. I think it enriched me as a musician to go into country music, and Patsy Cline was my huge influence. I emulated her in some fashion. She really was the person who instilled my interest.
What was it about Patsy Cline that attracted you?
Number one was the voice – she’s an amazing singer. Secondly, I think her physical stature, her presence, her sense of humour – well, from what I connected with in her music and understood to be her sense of humour – made her seem a little bit different to other country singers. I don’t know why, but she just seemed to have some sort of presence that the others didn’t.
“I started having girlfriends at a pretty young age, I suppose. I started having a serious girlfriend when I was about thirteen, and in a population of 650 people, that’s pretty astonishing!”
Are you proud to be a Canadian?
I’m very proud to be a Canadian.
They’re so far ahead in gay politics. How did that happen and what did you think about that time in Canada when gay marriage came about?
It’s obviously really exciting to be a citizen of a country that is one of the most progressive countries in the world for gay rights. It wasn’t always like that – Canada has really become more liberal in the last ten years on every front, including their absence from the Iraq war. Canada is a huge country geologically, but our population is pretty small, so to have a country that is progressive and liberal in its thinking is pretty exciting.
You choose to live in America as well, don’t you?
I do, yes. It’s a little easier, business-wise, and my relationships have grown down there, so it’s a little hard to just leave. But I’m still a Canadian citizen and all my family are still in Canada.
What do you feel towards America when you’re sitting in the thick of it?
America is a very complex country. It’s very progressive and influential on a lot of great levels, and yet it’s anchored in this sort of aggressive peace-keeper attitude that I think is really distasteful and very antiquated at this point. So it’s a complex country - half the country is republican and half are democrat. But it’s an exciting country, too, because it has influenced the world in a lot of great ways.
What do you think of the politics there at the moment, particularly the gay politics and the gay rights movement? Are you active in that?
I’m not so active in politics and I’ve never considered myself a political person. It’s just that my lifestyle has been politicized. I come from a more spiritual point of view, but I’ve always taken a great sense of pride and responsibility in helping to open the mindset and shed some light onto the gay and lesbian culture. It’s really a matter of a humanistic perspective, rather than a political one.
You came out in Canada when you were young, is that right?
I’m from Alberta, which is in the middle of the prairies. I started having girlfriends at a pretty young age, I suppose. I started having a serious girlfriend when I was about thirteen, and in a population of 650 people, that’s pretty astonishing! My sister and I came out to each other as I turned sixteen. It was obvious that my brother was gay, too, so I’m from a family where three out of four siblings are gay. My family culture is pretty liberal and pretty obviously gay, so it was very natural for me. I came out to my mother when I was seventeen. Although it was a fairly easy process for me, the conversation with the parent is never easy. But now my mother is certainly very accepting and very proud.
What was it like being in that small town environment?
Contrary to popular belief, I think it’s actually easy to be in a small town – or, at least, I found it easy – because everyone’s idiosyncrasies are normal. You know a lot about them, so it’s not like you can gravitate towards similar cliques or like-minded people. Rather, you’re thrown into this environment where you have to get along because it’s a very small town – it’s like a big family. You really have no choice but to know the ins and outs of someone’s differences, but they just become personality traits. I think that actually makes you a more open person.
“My sister and I came out to each other as I turned sixteen. It was obvious that my brother was gay, too, so I’m from a family where three out of four siblings are gay.”
Do you still see the people that you grew up with?
No, I think my first girlfriend moved to the city. My next girlfriend actually married a guy and lives in the town and I don’t see her very often.
Do you think it’s easier to come out as a gay woman as opposed to coming out as a gay man?
I don’t know – that’s a big debate amongst the queers, isn’t it? I think it’s all relative; I think it’s all dependent on your confidence level, your family situation and your living environment. I think there’re lots and lots – almost infinite - individual stories.
Have you ever had any problems in the music industry because you’re a gay woman?
No real concrete problems; the only tangible example I can give you is after Ingénue was a hit. The second single released ‘Mind of Love’, in which the refrain is, ‘Where is your head, Kathryn’ and I’m singing about myself. However, after the Vanity Fair cover and coming out in the Advocate, there was a lot of attention on my sexuality at the time, and radio stations chose not to play ‘Mind of Love’ because I was singing about a girl, even though it was an autobiographical song.
Did it anger you?
No, I’m not really an angry person. It just showed ignorance. You could look at the fact that I don’t get much airplay – because I really don’t – as being attributed to my orientation and maybe the fact that I have become a political persona intimidates advertisers.
Your breakthrough hit was ‘Constant Craving’. What was it like to suddenly become as famous as you did in that moment?
I’d been working very hard for seven or eight years before ‘Constant Craving’ became a hit, so it wasn’t like it came up overnight. But the success-o-meter definitely went off the charts at that time and it was really exciting – it’s a rush. It’s like being stoned – you get really high and then, as we all know, there’s unfortunately a down and its three or four times longer and harder than it is to get high. So it was tough to come down from it. It set the bar high in a lot of people’s minds – not just in my mind, but in the mind of the record company – everyone expected the next record to be that successful and everything else seemed to be a failure if it didn’t reach that level. It’s a life lesson that you have to go through.
Have you had everything you’ve ever wanted or do you want more? Is there anything that you still haven’t had or experienced?
Well, the next fifty years of my life I haven’t experienced yet – I’m excited about that! Yeah, there’re people and places and tastes and sounds – just life itself. Music is a big part of my life, but it’s just a part of my life. I could lose my voice in a car accident today and while it would be devastating, I don’t think it would be the end of my life in any respect. I’m just interested in what unfolds.
Are you interested in becoming as big as you were during the time of ‘Constant Craving’, or, as time has moved on, are you happy with what you’ve got now?
I love where I’m at right now. I don’t have to work as hard and I feel like I’m afforded a much easier pace and much looser expectations. Being on a label like Nonesuch Records at the age of 46 and even just being in the music business for 25 years is an astonishing success. Just to be able to be on a record label that still lets me make the kind of music that I want to make is amazing to me.
“I’ve always taken a great sense of pride and responsibility in helping to open the mindset and shed some light onto the gay and lesbian culture.”
Will there be any more music made with Tony Bennett?
It’s always great to sing and to work with Tony. He has an idea for another record, but he’s so busy!
Is there anything in particular that you’ve learnt from him?
The music speaks for itself, but there’s a certain elegance to him and a certain grace that is really beautiful in that old school entertainment world, where the audience is king. It’s not so self-driven or self-absorbed, and there’s something beautiful about that. I love how Tony is on and off stage - the way he is around people and how gracious he is. He’s a Renaissance guy – he paints and he reads biographies about songwriters and he loves talking politics, so we have a lot of things in common. Just to be around that and to be around somebody who has lived that much life – it’s a very enriching experience.
Is there anyone else who you would like to collaborate with?
There’re probably a thousand! I would have never predicted I would work with Tony Bennett and I would have never predicted that I would work with Roy Orbison, and yet they were two experiences that were so enriching. I think the element of surprise - of not being in control and just letting the universe bring these people into my life - is the most exciting for me.
Look out for our review of Watershed next week and more info on kd lang and tour at
MSN LANGISMS http://groups.msn.com/langisms .
Friday, January 25, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
The second coming of k.d. lang
From The Sunday Times
January 13, 2008
The second coming of kd Lang
When she came out 15 years ago, she became the poster girl of lesbian chic. Even Madonna courted her. Then the spotlight dimmed — until now. Robert Sandall is granted a rare audience with the woman once called Elvis. Portrait by Catherine Opie
When you listen to her new record, Watershed – as you definitely should if you have any interest in seriously beautiful songs – you may wonder what happened to the Canadian singer Kathy Lang, or “kd lang”, as her artfully professional alias styles her, after stardom hit her like a train in the 1990s. In her own quizzical way, so does she.
Looking back now on that mad time when she and big celebrity were engaged in a very public affair, Lang is philosophical. She doesn’t regret touting herself as the poster girl of lesbian chic when she appeared on an iconic 1992 cover of Vanity Fair magazine sitting in a barber’s chair being shaved by the supermodel Cindy Crawford. She is proud of her saucy reply to a male journalist who asked what was going through her mind at the time: “Pretty much what would have been going through yours in the same circumstances, I imagine.”
She says she enjoyed being courted by Madonna, then busily appointing herself pop’s ambassador for the gay community, posing for the paparazzi with her bisexual arm candy Sandra Bernhard.
Madge’s much-quoted line about Lang – “Elvis is alive, and she’s beautiful” – tickled her. So did the (unfounded) rumours that she was having an affair with Martina Navratilova. She loved being invited to the fashion shows, the Bel Air parties and all the other stellar hoopla that came with her inclusion on LA’s A-list. At least, she did for a while.
“It was fantastic, but it’s like a sugar high. I kind of got sucked in and thought that all these people were into me, when really they just want to share your aura of success, participate in that energy. I came to realise how superficial and temporary it is.”
Though Lang has been a resident of the Hollywood Hills for the past 16 years – she currently lives in a wood-and-stone cabin just off Mulholland Drive, where the actor Rock Hudson and his lover Tab Hunter hooked up for gay trysts – she keeps a much lower profile.
She is occasionally snapped eating out at Mr Chow in Beverly Hills, but when she isn’t working, Lang is mostly a homebody, living quietly with a girlfriend she refers to as “my wife” – they’re not legally married – and her two dogs. Now 46, her dress sense is unfabulous to the point of sloppy and her preferred hairstyle is middle-aged bed head. Shy but friendly and meticulously polite, she appears completely at ease with herself, and happy to talk about personal stuff and relationships, which in the past she avoided “in case I jinxed them”.
Ten years after the media brouhaha died down, Lang admits she feels uncomfortable with the exploitation of her lesbianism. “I kind of knew it was titillating and careless. But the direction of the time was so much about sex.” Much as she liked Madonna personally, she found the gay posturing “tiresome. A friend of mine said we should go around ‘inning’ all the people who were acting gay”. Lang went along with it, she says, “because Aids had created such an atmosphere of homophobia, and because Queer Nation [a gay pressure group] were outing people, I thought, ‘They’re going to out me’”.
Lang’s gayness, it must be said, was hardly a secret. She told her mother when she was 17; her friends all knew, as did many of the fans of her early country-style records, which featured images of a spiky-haired, big-boned young woman in full cowboy garb, sporting an enigmatic, sly grin.
At the time, openly gay pop stars were still a rarity – Michael Stipe of REM, George Michael and Morrissey were all still in the closet, and the recent Aids-related death of Freddie Mercury had come as a shock to many Queen fans. So Lang’s flamboyant declaration was very big news.
No female pop starlet had ever come out in this way before. And with two Grammy awards already under her belt and a multi-million-selling album, Ingénue, flying out of the shops and earning her a third, Lang was the hottest new kid on the block, of either sex, in 1992.
“I’d turned 30. I thought it was the most responsible thing to do, for myself and for society.” For the next three years, every interview she gave, be it for a gay magazine such as The Advocate, a tabloid daily or a women’s title, inevitably centred on her sexual orientation.
But was it detrimental to her career? While nobody has ever doubted the outstanding quality of her vocals – and she has carried on winning awards, most recently a Grammy in 2003 for her collaboration with the veteran crooner Tony Bennett – Lang has not come close to repeating the commercial or artistic success she achieved with Ingénue.
Many of the people who bought that album may still be wondering what became of the most gifted torch singer pop has produced since Peggy Lee, a performer equally hailed in country circles as the heiress to the late, great Patsy Cline.
Even those who kept up with Lang’s releases in the late 1990s must have been slightly discouraged by her last three albums, a slew of cover versions of Louis Armstrong numbers (2002’s A Wonderful World), songs by fellow Canadians (Hymns of the 49th Parallel, 2004) and, in 2006, a remixed reissue of some of her own earliest country recordings. She has put out no new original material in the eight years since she released Invincible Summer.
Lang admits that she has been suffering from writer’s block, a problem that has bothered her in the past, which is why she called her song-publishing company Pulling Teeth.
She says this got much worse “because of the atmosphere post-9/11, which made most artists take stock and ask, ‘Am I supposed to be political or spiritual?’” She also says that working on other people’s songs “left me with a strong sense of what a good song sounds like. That sort of changed my DNA as a songwriter”.
You suspect, though, that there might be a simpler reason why she has finally come up with a masterpiece that holds its place next to, maybe even slightly above, Ingénue. After a series of failed love affairs – which she never talked much about publicly but discreetly alluded to on previous albums – Lang’s restless heart has finally found a home. Once she began living with her current girlfriend, most of the songs on her new album virtually wrote themselves in the summer of 2006, a process she describes as “shockingly easy, probably because I wasn’t taking myself so seriously. You know how you date a lot of people, then you meet your match?”
Hence Watershed, an album that honours her “wife” and also distils and reflects on much that has happened to Lang, musically and otherwise, over the past 40-odd years. It’s not her coming-out record – Lang’s songs of love and yearning are never that specific – more her coming-of-age one. “I love the idea of water always victoriously finding its way around obstacles,” she says. “That’s my magic view of what life should do.”
Kathryn Dawn Lang was born and raised in Consort, Alberta, a small town in the middle of the Canadian prairies where many of the kids she went to school with still live. Her mother, Audrey, was a teacher; her father, Fred, owned the local store. The youngest of four children, she found out most of what she needed to know about herself by the age of five.
Namely, that she was sexually drawn to girls more than she was to boys, and that she was the owner of a phenomenal voice.
“I was studying classical piano and just faking my way through it. My brother and sisters were all really good players, but I couldn’t stand the theory and the math, so my teacher said, ‘Why don’t you try to sing?’”
A year later she won her first singing competition. “I had an absolute sense of vocation, and for that reason I never paid any attention to my studies at school. I failed everything, even my high-school diploma. I only got into music college because it was the first year of the course and only four people applied.”
When she was 12 her father abruptly ran off with the woman next door, never to return. There has been speculation that this might have been the event that tipped a sensitive teenager into becoming gay. Because he bought her a motorbike at the age of nine, taught her to shoot, and generally treated her more like a son, Fred Lang is often taken to have been a defining influence on his daughter’s sexuality. “I can talk about my father all day, but I learnt a long time ago that parents are just people, and you can’t expect them to fit your idea of how things should be. They are just trying to do their best.”
In the case of Mr Lang, that meant moving to the state capital, Edmonton, with his new love and having no further contact with any of his family. Aside from a chance encounter on the street while she was a student, Lang never saw or spoke to him after the day he drove off leaving her alone in the house, in bed with flu. When he died in July 2007, she wasn’t notified – none of the Lang clan were – and so she didn’t attend the funeral. She is, however, adamant that there are no unresolved hurts.
“My grieving process was many years ago. I have a beautiful feeling of emancipation about it now, because for years my relationship with my father has been all in my mind anyway. We were physically separated and now it’s just about me and his spirit. I saw a picture of him recently, and he looked really happy. And that made me happy.”
Happiness did not come easily. Lang was nearly 30 before she fell in love for the first time. She devoted her twenties to her career, building an unrivalled reputation as the finest female vocalist of her generation. In 1987, Roy Orbison invited her to duet with him on a re-recording of his hit Crying, for which she won her first Grammy award. She earned more plaudits for her work with the legendary Nashville producer Owen Bradley, and scored another Grammy in 1989 for Best Female Country Vocal Performance with her third album, Absolute Torch and Twang.
Lang’s relationship with the hard-core country audience – always tenuous, given her butch image – then soured after she publicly espoused vegetarianism, creating an uproar that reached all the way back to Consort, where the graffiti on the town sign read “Eat Beef, Dyke!”
As she contemplated a shift of direction away to classic balladry – in the process becoming a pioneer of the 1990s vogue for easy listening – Lang developed a passion for a lesbian who was living in LA and in a relationship with another woman. The Canadian country girl upped sticks from Vancouver to LA to be near her new not-quite girlfriend, and wrote and recorded Ingénue. “I loved the word because it was so sophisticated. I called the album that because the feeling of love makes you feel like a complete ingénue. I’d fallen for this real Californian girl, and the newness of the switch to living down here I found intoxicating.”
Today, Lang considers this affair to have been a symptom of emotional immaturity and careerist calculation. “I always used to gravitate towards chaotic experiences for inspiration. I would sabotage situations so that I would have fodder for songwriting, by having an affair or just breaking up.” Lang says that she has addressed this tendency in Flame of the Uninspired, a song on her new album.
The post-Ingénue celebrity circus took its toll on a songwriter, and it was seven years before Lang came up with a set of original songs with the oomph of Ingénue. The inspiration for Invincible Summer was supplied by a five-year affair with a fellow musician, Leisha Hailey, the singer in an all-girl group, the Murmurs. Lang herself insists that “we had a joyous time, high up there in terms of the energy level, and I think the album reflects that”.
The dawn of the 21st century proved a difficult time for Lang. The bust-up with Hailey was acrimonious. As it was unravelling, it transpired that her business manager had somehow misplaced $2m of her money. Lang’s creativity headed for the hills, taking cover in other people’s work. She became best buddies with Tony Bennett, recording and touring with an octogenarian evergreen whom she loves, she says, “for that old-world sophistication. Tony’s 81, and he’s still out there doing it. If he stops singing, he’ll die”.
What really started to turn things around for her, Lang thinks, was her becoming a Buddhist in 2001. This has finally helped her sort out her “priorities and motivations”. The calmness with which she now views everything from her remarkable, absconding dad to her crooked accountant and her hitherto disruptive approach to relationships, is all a part of “the way Buddhism inverts your preconceptions”.
She says she always believed in the idea of reincarnation, “even as a teenager”, but that until she met her teacher “it was like having a car but not knowing how to drive”. Lang found herself with a new companion, a fellow Buddhist who works as a volunteer for various Buddhist organisations. “She is very honest with me, very mature and intelligent; incredibly honest in refining my best attributes and curbing my less attractive ones.” Which are? “Being flirty. And careless. For me, being careless has always been the big one.”
Gone are the days when a careless Kathy Lang would allow journalists into her home for interviews and chat about the Hudson/Hunter “sexual vibe” that first attracted her to buy the place. Today she says: “It’s crazy for the gay community to let itself be defined by its sexual preferences.”
She will happily talk about how “the Beverly Hills marble is not my style”. How she much prefers Hollywood rustic – the sycamore wood that adjoins her modest cabin in the hills, the bougainvillea-lined hiking paths that pass near it, and the two dogs she loves to play with in the garden – “They think I’m one of the pack!”
But home now is where the heart is, and professional contacts are kept at a distance. While we’ve been talking as Lang and her new band are preparing for the 2008 world tour, her ironically styled “wife” has been preparing the supper: veggie coconut curry, Lang’s favourite.
The only relationship that now gives Lang any serious cause for concern is the one she has with her singing voice. She worries about a tendency to over-emote, rather than, as she prefers, simply to inhabit and animate the song. “Part of the process is learning how not to force your voice. And that’s really hard.” She says she now disapproves of some of her most celebrated performances, notably the duet with Roy Orbison.
Then again, the Buddhist in her, or something, tells Lang that at this point in her life she should stop beating herself up about the mistakes of her past and just revel now in her extraordinary talent. “When you have a 12-cylinder engine, I guess it’s hard not to put the pedal to the metal sometimes,” she says with a parting grin .
Photos and further article on Langisms http://groups.msn.com/langisms
January 13, 2008
The second coming of kd Lang
When she came out 15 years ago, she became the poster girl of lesbian chic. Even Madonna courted her. Then the spotlight dimmed — until now. Robert Sandall is granted a rare audience with the woman once called Elvis. Portrait by Catherine Opie
When you listen to her new record, Watershed – as you definitely should if you have any interest in seriously beautiful songs – you may wonder what happened to the Canadian singer Kathy Lang, or “kd lang”, as her artfully professional alias styles her, after stardom hit her like a train in the 1990s. In her own quizzical way, so does she.
Looking back now on that mad time when she and big celebrity were engaged in a very public affair, Lang is philosophical. She doesn’t regret touting herself as the poster girl of lesbian chic when she appeared on an iconic 1992 cover of Vanity Fair magazine sitting in a barber’s chair being shaved by the supermodel Cindy Crawford. She is proud of her saucy reply to a male journalist who asked what was going through her mind at the time: “Pretty much what would have been going through yours in the same circumstances, I imagine.”
She says she enjoyed being courted by Madonna, then busily appointing herself pop’s ambassador for the gay community, posing for the paparazzi with her bisexual arm candy Sandra Bernhard.
Madge’s much-quoted line about Lang – “Elvis is alive, and she’s beautiful” – tickled her. So did the (unfounded) rumours that she was having an affair with Martina Navratilova. She loved being invited to the fashion shows, the Bel Air parties and all the other stellar hoopla that came with her inclusion on LA’s A-list. At least, she did for a while.
“It was fantastic, but it’s like a sugar high. I kind of got sucked in and thought that all these people were into me, when really they just want to share your aura of success, participate in that energy. I came to realise how superficial and temporary it is.”
Though Lang has been a resident of the Hollywood Hills for the past 16 years – she currently lives in a wood-and-stone cabin just off Mulholland Drive, where the actor Rock Hudson and his lover Tab Hunter hooked up for gay trysts – she keeps a much lower profile.
She is occasionally snapped eating out at Mr Chow in Beverly Hills, but when she isn’t working, Lang is mostly a homebody, living quietly with a girlfriend she refers to as “my wife” – they’re not legally married – and her two dogs. Now 46, her dress sense is unfabulous to the point of sloppy and her preferred hairstyle is middle-aged bed head. Shy but friendly and meticulously polite, she appears completely at ease with herself, and happy to talk about personal stuff and relationships, which in the past she avoided “in case I jinxed them”.
Ten years after the media brouhaha died down, Lang admits she feels uncomfortable with the exploitation of her lesbianism. “I kind of knew it was titillating and careless. But the direction of the time was so much about sex.” Much as she liked Madonna personally, she found the gay posturing “tiresome. A friend of mine said we should go around ‘inning’ all the people who were acting gay”. Lang went along with it, she says, “because Aids had created such an atmosphere of homophobia, and because Queer Nation [a gay pressure group] were outing people, I thought, ‘They’re going to out me’”.
Lang’s gayness, it must be said, was hardly a secret. She told her mother when she was 17; her friends all knew, as did many of the fans of her early country-style records, which featured images of a spiky-haired, big-boned young woman in full cowboy garb, sporting an enigmatic, sly grin.
At the time, openly gay pop stars were still a rarity – Michael Stipe of REM, George Michael and Morrissey were all still in the closet, and the recent Aids-related death of Freddie Mercury had come as a shock to many Queen fans. So Lang’s flamboyant declaration was very big news.
No female pop starlet had ever come out in this way before. And with two Grammy awards already under her belt and a multi-million-selling album, Ingénue, flying out of the shops and earning her a third, Lang was the hottest new kid on the block, of either sex, in 1992.
“I’d turned 30. I thought it was the most responsible thing to do, for myself and for society.” For the next three years, every interview she gave, be it for a gay magazine such as The Advocate, a tabloid daily or a women’s title, inevitably centred on her sexual orientation.
But was it detrimental to her career? While nobody has ever doubted the outstanding quality of her vocals – and she has carried on winning awards, most recently a Grammy in 2003 for her collaboration with the veteran crooner Tony Bennett – Lang has not come close to repeating the commercial or artistic success she achieved with Ingénue.
Many of the people who bought that album may still be wondering what became of the most gifted torch singer pop has produced since Peggy Lee, a performer equally hailed in country circles as the heiress to the late, great Patsy Cline.
Even those who kept up with Lang’s releases in the late 1990s must have been slightly discouraged by her last three albums, a slew of cover versions of Louis Armstrong numbers (2002’s A Wonderful World), songs by fellow Canadians (Hymns of the 49th Parallel, 2004) and, in 2006, a remixed reissue of some of her own earliest country recordings. She has put out no new original material in the eight years since she released Invincible Summer.
Lang admits that she has been suffering from writer’s block, a problem that has bothered her in the past, which is why she called her song-publishing company Pulling Teeth.
She says this got much worse “because of the atmosphere post-9/11, which made most artists take stock and ask, ‘Am I supposed to be political or spiritual?’” She also says that working on other people’s songs “left me with a strong sense of what a good song sounds like. That sort of changed my DNA as a songwriter”.
You suspect, though, that there might be a simpler reason why she has finally come up with a masterpiece that holds its place next to, maybe even slightly above, Ingénue. After a series of failed love affairs – which she never talked much about publicly but discreetly alluded to on previous albums – Lang’s restless heart has finally found a home. Once she began living with her current girlfriend, most of the songs on her new album virtually wrote themselves in the summer of 2006, a process she describes as “shockingly easy, probably because I wasn’t taking myself so seriously. You know how you date a lot of people, then you meet your match?”
Hence Watershed, an album that honours her “wife” and also distils and reflects on much that has happened to Lang, musically and otherwise, over the past 40-odd years. It’s not her coming-out record – Lang’s songs of love and yearning are never that specific – more her coming-of-age one. “I love the idea of water always victoriously finding its way around obstacles,” she says. “That’s my magic view of what life should do.”
Kathryn Dawn Lang was born and raised in Consort, Alberta, a small town in the middle of the Canadian prairies where many of the kids she went to school with still live. Her mother, Audrey, was a teacher; her father, Fred, owned the local store. The youngest of four children, she found out most of what she needed to know about herself by the age of five.
Namely, that she was sexually drawn to girls more than she was to boys, and that she was the owner of a phenomenal voice.
“I was studying classical piano and just faking my way through it. My brother and sisters were all really good players, but I couldn’t stand the theory and the math, so my teacher said, ‘Why don’t you try to sing?’”
A year later she won her first singing competition. “I had an absolute sense of vocation, and for that reason I never paid any attention to my studies at school. I failed everything, even my high-school diploma. I only got into music college because it was the first year of the course and only four people applied.”
When she was 12 her father abruptly ran off with the woman next door, never to return. There has been speculation that this might have been the event that tipped a sensitive teenager into becoming gay. Because he bought her a motorbike at the age of nine, taught her to shoot, and generally treated her more like a son, Fred Lang is often taken to have been a defining influence on his daughter’s sexuality. “I can talk about my father all day, but I learnt a long time ago that parents are just people, and you can’t expect them to fit your idea of how things should be. They are just trying to do their best.”
In the case of Mr Lang, that meant moving to the state capital, Edmonton, with his new love and having no further contact with any of his family. Aside from a chance encounter on the street while she was a student, Lang never saw or spoke to him after the day he drove off leaving her alone in the house, in bed with flu. When he died in July 2007, she wasn’t notified – none of the Lang clan were – and so she didn’t attend the funeral. She is, however, adamant that there are no unresolved hurts.
“My grieving process was many years ago. I have a beautiful feeling of emancipation about it now, because for years my relationship with my father has been all in my mind anyway. We were physically separated and now it’s just about me and his spirit. I saw a picture of him recently, and he looked really happy. And that made me happy.”
Happiness did not come easily. Lang was nearly 30 before she fell in love for the first time. She devoted her twenties to her career, building an unrivalled reputation as the finest female vocalist of her generation. In 1987, Roy Orbison invited her to duet with him on a re-recording of his hit Crying, for which she won her first Grammy award. She earned more plaudits for her work with the legendary Nashville producer Owen Bradley, and scored another Grammy in 1989 for Best Female Country Vocal Performance with her third album, Absolute Torch and Twang.
Lang’s relationship with the hard-core country audience – always tenuous, given her butch image – then soured after she publicly espoused vegetarianism, creating an uproar that reached all the way back to Consort, where the graffiti on the town sign read “Eat Beef, Dyke!”
As she contemplated a shift of direction away to classic balladry – in the process becoming a pioneer of the 1990s vogue for easy listening – Lang developed a passion for a lesbian who was living in LA and in a relationship with another woman. The Canadian country girl upped sticks from Vancouver to LA to be near her new not-quite girlfriend, and wrote and recorded Ingénue. “I loved the word because it was so sophisticated. I called the album that because the feeling of love makes you feel like a complete ingénue. I’d fallen for this real Californian girl, and the newness of the switch to living down here I found intoxicating.”
Today, Lang considers this affair to have been a symptom of emotional immaturity and careerist calculation. “I always used to gravitate towards chaotic experiences for inspiration. I would sabotage situations so that I would have fodder for songwriting, by having an affair or just breaking up.” Lang says that she has addressed this tendency in Flame of the Uninspired, a song on her new album.
The post-Ingénue celebrity circus took its toll on a songwriter, and it was seven years before Lang came up with a set of original songs with the oomph of Ingénue. The inspiration for Invincible Summer was supplied by a five-year affair with a fellow musician, Leisha Hailey, the singer in an all-girl group, the Murmurs. Lang herself insists that “we had a joyous time, high up there in terms of the energy level, and I think the album reflects that”.
The dawn of the 21st century proved a difficult time for Lang. The bust-up with Hailey was acrimonious. As it was unravelling, it transpired that her business manager had somehow misplaced $2m of her money. Lang’s creativity headed for the hills, taking cover in other people’s work. She became best buddies with Tony Bennett, recording and touring with an octogenarian evergreen whom she loves, she says, “for that old-world sophistication. Tony’s 81, and he’s still out there doing it. If he stops singing, he’ll die”.
What really started to turn things around for her, Lang thinks, was her becoming a Buddhist in 2001. This has finally helped her sort out her “priorities and motivations”. The calmness with which she now views everything from her remarkable, absconding dad to her crooked accountant and her hitherto disruptive approach to relationships, is all a part of “the way Buddhism inverts your preconceptions”.
She says she always believed in the idea of reincarnation, “even as a teenager”, but that until she met her teacher “it was like having a car but not knowing how to drive”. Lang found herself with a new companion, a fellow Buddhist who works as a volunteer for various Buddhist organisations. “She is very honest with me, very mature and intelligent; incredibly honest in refining my best attributes and curbing my less attractive ones.” Which are? “Being flirty. And careless. For me, being careless has always been the big one.”
Gone are the days when a careless Kathy Lang would allow journalists into her home for interviews and chat about the Hudson/Hunter “sexual vibe” that first attracted her to buy the place. Today she says: “It’s crazy for the gay community to let itself be defined by its sexual preferences.”
She will happily talk about how “the Beverly Hills marble is not my style”. How she much prefers Hollywood rustic – the sycamore wood that adjoins her modest cabin in the hills, the bougainvillea-lined hiking paths that pass near it, and the two dogs she loves to play with in the garden – “They think I’m one of the pack!”
But home now is where the heart is, and professional contacts are kept at a distance. While we’ve been talking as Lang and her new band are preparing for the 2008 world tour, her ironically styled “wife” has been preparing the supper: veggie coconut curry, Lang’s favourite.
The only relationship that now gives Lang any serious cause for concern is the one she has with her singing voice. She worries about a tendency to over-emote, rather than, as she prefers, simply to inhabit and animate the song. “Part of the process is learning how not to force your voice. And that’s really hard.” She says she now disapproves of some of her most celebrated performances, notably the duet with Roy Orbison.
Then again, the Buddhist in her, or something, tells Lang that at this point in her life she should stop beating herself up about the mistakes of her past and just revel now in her extraordinary talent. “When you have a 12-cylinder engine, I guess it’s hard not to put the pedal to the metal sometimes,” she says with a parting grin .
Photos and further article on Langisms http://groups.msn.com/langisms
Friday, January 11, 2008
Video: Preview kd lang's New Album, "Watershed"
Video: Preview kd lang's New Album, "Watershed" 12 hours ago by nonesuch
With the February 5 release of kd lang's Watershed, just weeks away, Nonesuch Records is pleased to present this video preview featuring music and images from the forthcoming album, along with insights from kd on this her first collection of new, original tunes in eight years and her first-ever self-produced effort:
sources:
http://journal.nonesuch.com/journal/2008/01/video-preview-k.html
http://groups.msn.com/langisms
With the February 5 release of kd lang's Watershed, just weeks away, Nonesuch Records is pleased to present this video preview featuring music and images from the forthcoming album, along with insights from kd on this her first collection of new, original tunes in eight years and her first-ever self-produced effort:
sources:
http://journal.nonesuch.com/journal/2008/01/video-preview-k.html
http://groups.msn.com/langisms
Friday, January 4, 2008
k.d. lang Set To Release Album Of New Material In February
k.d. lang Set To Release Album Of New Material In February
Artist: K.D. Lang
Album: Watershed nonesuch records
mog
There's been talk since she toured with Lyle Lovett last summer, about new music from k.d. lang. The singer-songwriter hasn't released any new original material in almost a decade, and while the 11 songs on her upcoming album Watershed took many years to write and record, the music will be fresh when it hits the stores on February 5th (usa/worldwide), 28 january (europe) 9 feb (australia).
Watershed Tracklist:
"I Dream of Spring"
"Je Fais La Planche"
"Coming Home"
"Once in a While"
"Thread"
"Close Your Eyes"
"Sunday"
"Flame of the Uninspired"
"Upstream"
"Shadow and the Frame"
"Jealous Dog"
k.d. lang told Billboard:
"I think what was liberating is that it's really hard to translate your vision in audio to other people," she continues. "It gets interpreted in so many different ways. In some ways it can be enhancing, but [on 'Watershed'] there is sort of a convergence of all the different styles I have tackled and listened to. There's essence of country, there's essences of pop, there's essences of Brazillian."
She also described her recording methods as "mobile." She worked with Tony Bennett in NYC , recorded songs in her dining room and painting studio and other places that inspired her acoustically. She went on to tell Billboard:
"The Tony record was rehearsed in his living room, overlooking Central Park. And it was actually recorded live off a stage, in a theatre," she recalls. "It was very much play the song and record it. But it made me very focused on the performance and not any overdubbing."
Read more at Billboard
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003691291
source: msn langisms http://groups.msn.com/langisms
Artist: K.D. Lang
Album: Watershed nonesuch records
mog
There's been talk since she toured with Lyle Lovett last summer, about new music from k.d. lang. The singer-songwriter hasn't released any new original material in almost a decade, and while the 11 songs on her upcoming album Watershed took many years to write and record, the music will be fresh when it hits the stores on February 5th (usa/worldwide), 28 january (europe) 9 feb (australia).
Watershed Tracklist:
"I Dream of Spring"
"Je Fais La Planche"
"Coming Home"
"Once in a While"
"Thread"
"Close Your Eyes"
"Sunday"
"Flame of the Uninspired"
"Upstream"
"Shadow and the Frame"
"Jealous Dog"
k.d. lang told Billboard:
"I think what was liberating is that it's really hard to translate your vision in audio to other people," she continues. "It gets interpreted in so many different ways. In some ways it can be enhancing, but [on 'Watershed'] there is sort of a convergence of all the different styles I have tackled and listened to. There's essence of country, there's essences of pop, there's essences of Brazillian."
She also described her recording methods as "mobile." She worked with Tony Bennett in NYC , recorded songs in her dining room and painting studio and other places that inspired her acoustically. She went on to tell Billboard:
"The Tony record was rehearsed in his living room, overlooking Central Park. And it was actually recorded live off a stage, in a theatre," she recalls. "It was very much play the song and record it. But it made me very focused on the performance and not any overdubbing."
Read more at Billboard
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003691291
source: msn langisms http://groups.msn.com/langisms
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