During her concert last night before an ecstatic near-capacity audience at Ruth Eckerd Hall, k.d. lang sang “The Valley” by Jane Siberry, complimenting her fellow Canadian singer/ songwriter for her combination of “passion and equanimity.” That’s a rare combination, but it’s one that lang can claim, too. As she demonstrated in number after number, including “The Valley,” she can go from soaring to intimate to down-home friendly all in the space of an evening – or sometimes even within one song.

Her voice is better than ever. It’s richer and darker now, yet she can still hit and sustain high notes as pure and lovely as a mountain stream. Barefoot, dressed in a velvet-and-satin vest and baggy trousers, she seemed supremely relaxed. She flirted with the audience on the pop standard “Smoke Rings”(“puff, puff, puff”), and plumbed the anguish in Leonard Cohen’s all-too-familiar “Hallelujah Song.” She found new colors in her mega-hit, “Constant Craving,” breaking up that familiar fluid refrain and smiling wryly on the line “It’s always been,” as if to acknowledge that we’re all victims of love, gay or straight or whatever. And on one of her two encores she broke out a banjo; she started playing it this year, she explained, “because I realized it is a chick magnet.”

The songs from her latest album, Watershed, made a strong impression. There’s a grounded ruefulness to the lyrics — “It’s sad to me how quickly we define what’s wrong with yours is right with mine/ You think that we could learn to let things slide?” But the melodies, and the musicianship of her fine five-man band, kept everything percolating.

“I promised myself I wasn’t going to get political on this tour,” she said at one point. But that didn’t stop her from dedicating a rollicking bluegrassy rendition of “Pay Dirt” to “the boys from Halliburton,” complete with a knee-slapping, butt-kicking jig.

The Halliburton crack (and a few others) was what probably provoked a disgruntled concertgoer I overheard after the concert.

“Shut up and sing!” he fumed. “I didn’t pay to hear your politics!”

He was in the minority, I suspect, when it came to the politics. And, really, lang sang a lot more than she talked. Yet even after 90 minutes and 15 songs, she still left you longing for more of that addictive voice.

This article appears in Feb 27 – Mar 4, 2008.