On her current tour, k.d. lang may be performing with symphony orchestras, but don't mistake her for a diva. When she fronts the Florida Orchestra on May 19 at Ruth Eckerd Hall, it's very, very unlikely she'll have big hair or throw a tantrum backstage because her bottled water is a couple of degrees too cold.
During a phone interview, lang is relaxed and charming, and she seems to delight in lighthearted self-deprecation. Describing the set she'll sing, lang says, "About half of it will be songs that I've done," then chuckles "… I almost said 'songs that I'm famous for.'"
Lang, 42, was much more famous a dozen years ago, when her elegant pop album Ingenue made a big splash. She came out as gay around that time and frolicked with Cindy Crawford in the pages of Vanity Fair. Her celebrity has cooled since, mostly because instead of chasing it, she willfully skipped around to projects that interested her musically: doing an oddball soundtrack to the oddball movie Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (as a follow-up to Ingenue, no less); releasing an album of pop covers; putting out a duet disc with Tony Bennett of songs inspired by Louis Armstrong; and kicking off the JVC Jazz Festival, to name a few.
And as for her latest endeavor — that'll be represented in the other half of her concert. Lang's new CD, due out in July, finds her singing material by some of the greatest tunesmiths of her native Canada: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Cockburn, Jane Siberry and others.
"It's an embarrassment of riches," she says of the north-of-the-border repertoire.
Lang first made her mark in Edmonton, Alberta, as an androgynous, campy cowgirl fronting a band called the re-clines (named in honor of her hero, Patsy Cline). While growing up in Consort, Alberta (pop. 700), though, she disdained country music. She studied classical piano and soaked up the likes of Maria Muldaur, Blind Faith, Kate Bush, Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones. Lang switched to guitar and started performing what she has called "comedic avant-garde folk music like Jonathan Richman or The Roches."
At college in Edmonton, 150 miles northwest of her hometown, lang delved into performance art, painting and industrial punk. Then on her 21st birthday, lang's best friend gave her a used copy of Cline's Stop the World and Let Me Get Off. The LP sparked an "instantaneous click" in the budding artist, and suddenly it all became clear: "Oh my God, I'm gonna do country punk."
She plunged into the chronicles of country music — records, books, clips from the goofy old show Hee Haw, rhinestones and fringe.
With the re-clines, k.d. lang did mostly originals, and while she never outright copied Cline, the two sang with a similar richness of tone, torchy soul and penchant for jazzy phrasing. A couple of independent albums led to lang signing with Sire in '86. She spent the rest of the decade dancing warily with the country music establishment, which never fully embraced her unconventional image. The period did produce three formidable albums and a couple of C&W hits, including a duet with Roy Orbison on his old number "Crying."
The dawn of the '90s marked a major shift in lang's life and career. "Absolute Torch and Twang ('89) won a Grammy and I started to be visible in a pop sense," she explains. "With that comes tabloids and press interested in who you're sleeping with. At the exact same time, Queer Nation was outing people. I just felt like, 'This is ridiculous. You have homophobes and then you have queers outing people. I'm going to come out, do it before anyone else does it, with as much grace and elegance as possible.'
"Besides, I didn't think it would come as such a huge surprise," she adds with a laugh. Lang revealed her sexuality in an interview with the gay publication The Advocate.
You might think such a move would cause upheaval in the record company boardroom, but not so, says lang: "I remember one executive saying, 'You don't need to; you can be just like Whitney Houston.' I don't even know if she's gay, or whatever. But I said, 'I don't want to do that. I don't want to pretend I'm married, I don't want to pretend, period.' They said, 'Uh, OK, it's a risk; your career might suffer.'"
Did it? "Zero," she replies. "Maybe a little bit. But I gained from it as well. I don't think Ingenue would've been as big if I was not out."
Coming out probably would've hurt if lang was still making her bed in country, but Ingenue made a clean break from her cowgirl days. The album's success was spurred by its breakout hit "Constant Craving," a sexy, decidedly non-country slice of moody pop.
With her new direction, lang put Patsy behind her for good. "I don't know what happened exactly," she says. "I wanted to move on. My influences were vast and starting to seep through. Even to this day I can't listen to a lot of Pasty. It feels a little too emotional for me. Not only do I have this reverence for Patsy Cline, but it's now my history. It's like really hard. I love to hear one of her songs in a bar — I get kind of emotional — but it's not something I would play on a Sunday afternoon."
The full Florida Orchestra will open the program with five pop numbers. Lang will join them for the last. After an intermission, she'll perform with just the strings and her own band. Songs include "After the Goldrush," "Crying," "Constant Craving," "Three Cigarettes" and others. Hell, we don't want to take all the surprise out of it.
Contact Senior Writer Eric Snider at 813-739-4853, or eric.snider@ weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in May 13-19, 2004.