What kd did next
(Filed: 31/08/2004)
Until her 1992 album 'Ingenue', kd lang was a cheeky cowgirl who upset old-school Nashville with her disrespectful ways. Before you could say platinum disc, she was whisked into the heady world of superstardom and became the poster-girl for lesbian chic - but the party was over almost as soon as it had begun. Now the torch-singer who flew too close to the flames is back to her best, writes Tom Shone
Kd lang lives in one of the nicer bits of Los Angeles: up a winding leafy road in the Hollywood Hills, tucked well away from the honking neon of Sunset Boulevard. The house is a 1939 cabin-style wood-and-stone hideaway that looks out on to a forest of 100-year-old sycamore trees. The trees were one of the reasons that persuaded lang to buy it five years ago - the trees and the fact that it used to belong to Rock Hudson and his homosexual lover Tab Hunter. 'It was their sex cabin,' lang says boldly, and then laughs, sounding a little abashed at her own boldness. 'It's got that vibe.'
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These days, the vibe has added up a few new tones - earthier, more au naturel, a little more Buddha-friendly and green-tea-drinking, a little less in-the-closet, a little more que sera sera. A sex cabin still, but with a little more zen about it. Visitors thread past lang's Harley-Davidson in the driveway, negotiate the two dogs that spring from inside her front door, and are invited to sit in her cool, tiled kitchen.
Lang likes it here, she says, particularly in the mornings when she pads around the house, filling up the birdbath, reading the paper, singing to herself, doing whatever. 'Any interaction you have with people is your choice,' she says. 'I know people who don't even leave their house. But there's also so many ways to explore nature, the hiking trails and so on. People don't really think that about LA.'
She has had more than her fill of the other LA - the one that sits at the bottom of her road, where egos get built up to the size of billboards and are then torn down again to make way for someone else. Back in the early 1990s, lang experienced Grammy-winning, platinum-record success with Ingenue, her album of country-inflected torch-songs, and overnight became the poster-girl for the then emergent lesbian chic. 'Elvis is alive… and she's beautiful,' Madonna declared.
Photographed for the cover of Vanity Fair being shaved by Cindy Crawford in a barber's chair ('What was going through your mind?' asked a male journalist. 'Pretty much what would have been going through yours in the same circumstance, I think,' lang replied). She was feted by designers and invited to fashion shows, where she ogled the models before returning home to wonder where all her new friends had gone. 'It's like I tried heroin and walked away from it,' she said, and by the time she quit the scene, she could feel 'the paranoia dripping out of my pores'.
'I remember being very disillusioned and disappointed with the Holy Grail,' she says now, taking a sip of Evian, sitting at the kitchen table in jeans, T-shirt and shirt, all topped off with a tangle of sleepy hair. 'You experience some pretty cruel lessons when you get to the top, and I guess that my ideals or my disillusionment plus coming out… the whole Ingenue experience, it's really hard to say which was fame and which was coming out and which was working too hard - you know, we toured for 18 months. There was a culmination of a lot of things going on. I was kind of angry, and I was tired. When you get tired you get curt. Every interview I did for three years straight was about being gay.'
The good news is that, after a fitful series of albums, lang's latest is easily her best since Ingenue - not destined for anything like the pop super-stratum of that album, but working on a fully recharged set of batteries none the less. Entitled Hymns of the 49th Parallel, which is a fancy way of saying 'Songs by Canadians', it comprises a beautiful set of spare, pared-down covers of songs by lang's compatriots: Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Jane Siberry.
It was very brave of her, I suggest; it was something of an open secret, of course, most of her fans having known she was Canadian for years, but still, it should make it a lot easier for other Canadians to come out of the closet and be counted. 'Oh, yeah, I'm good at open secrets,' she says, with a laugh. 'I actually think [the album's] pretty close to who I really am. This is pretty much how I sing when I'm singing around the house - not thinking, not trying to do one thing or another…' Needless to say, it doesn't exactly sound like you or me when we let loose with Don't You Want Me in the shower.
There have been many attempts to describe the richness and power of lang's voice, which has always seemed like one of God's better jokes against the religious right in America: there He was, trying to figure out to whom He should give the most heavenly voice on earth since Karen Carpenter died, before finally alighting on kd lang: 'How about… that… Canadian… lesbian over… there.' What marks her out from the current crop of florid diva warblers is her unfashionable dedication to the song, rather than the singer. The likes of Mariah Carey look on a song as a chance to give their voices an aerobic workout, but lang's voice hits a note and stays there, cutting through it like a fin through water.
'That's a combination of two things: of growing up in the prairies, where there was always just open sky and land, a very dualistic environment, if that's the right word; and also a conscious movement away from over-ornamenting the vocal. There was a point when there were a few singers who did that and it was real emotion - Stevie Wonder, gospel singers - but now it's an imitation of an imitation of something that was once learnt. So I started sculpting mine the opposite way. I don't know if you've ever been in the ocean when the sun is setting, where there's just that horizon line, but that's kind of how I feel just sitting there, in stillness and perfect clarity. I love that.'
Kathryn Dawn Lang was raised in Consort, Alberta, the sort of town with one gas station, one barbershop and one drugstore - in this case owned by her father, which meant she had unlimited access to chocolate bars and sweets. Beyond the town's borders, though, lay dry, rolling prairie-land of the sort that seemed to cry out for a teenager's dreams to come along and fill it.
The youngest of four children - she has two older sisters and a brother - lang knew she wanted to be a singer since the age of about five, and she knew she fancied women from the year dot. Her father (a dead ringer for Leonard Cohen - big nose, big eyebrows, a big long slanted forehead, salt-and-pepper hair 'slicked back and cut in a great classical man's cut') bought her her first guitar when she was six and her first motorcycle when she was nine. He used to take her boating and water-skiing in the summer, and every week they went shooting using old-fashioned muzzle-loaders. It was 'a real father-son relationship', and they were as thick as thieves until one day in June, when lang was 12, and she heard the door slam, the car start and voom - that was pretty much the last she saw of him.
'I can't answer for him, I only know from a 12-year-old's perspective what happened,' she says with surprising equanimity. 'He was having an affair with the next-door neighbour for three years or more, and he had decided that the best thing for him to do was leave. I don't blame it all on my father. I never saw him again - I mean, I did run into him about 10 years later in the street in Edmonton.' They squinted at each other, had five minutes of conversation; she said she forgave him and they went on their way.
Wasn't she roiling inside?
'I think that it's so complex,' she says. 'I understood every aspect of it. I understood his inability to deal with it, I understood my mother's pain, I understood my pain, and yet the appreciation and the fascination with what I saw and what I felt, I think it was really in my best interest to be curious about it, rather than make a polarised judgement about it. I have made records from all points of view. With Ingenue especially I was replaying my father's field.'
There's a lot to be drawn from this, lang's slightly spooky detachment, her ability to deal with strong emotions through role-play - both of which would be a feature of her recordings. Even at its most heartbreaking pitch, you can hear the wink in lang's voice - not the knowing wink of outright irony, perhaps, but something more flirtatious, playful. Her voice alights on an emotion, plumbs it, and then coasts off again with such superb unruffleable ease that even pain ends up sounding like a breeze. If it's any consolation, John Updike has much the same problem with his prose, but lang's endless facility can sometimes seem a little self-pleasuring: what do you do with a voice that can do pretty much anything?
You felt this most strongly at the beginning of kd lang's career in the mid-1980s, when her sly fun at the expense of country and western's kitschier aspects - she wore plastic cow badges and a short spiky quiff, and sowed sedition in interviews with comments such as 'The higher the hair, the closer to God' - met up with the implacable perfection of her voice, and God's joke got really rolling. The Nashville old guard were understandably perplexed. They couldn't quite put their finger on what it was but something wasn't quite right about this girl. 'I think they just didn't know what to make of me,' she says. 'I showed up and I was doing this crazy thing. It wasn't country, I just didn't really fit into a set demographic, so advertisers are always a little bit afraid of me.'
It was a marriage that wasn't meant to be, then, I suggest.
'But it was a good affair that benefited both of us. I made some incredible friendships during my Nashville days. It was a… passing fling.'
It was on 1992's Ingenue that everything came together for the first time. Written in the shadow of an unrequited love for a married woman, the album balanced svelte torch-songs such as Save Me with featherweight pop bliss-outs like Miss Chatelaine (what lang called her 'Doris-Day-Holidaying-in-Paris' song), although Ingenue suffered horribly from its ubiquity, which whittled it down to a single indigo mood. 'It's a difficult misconception that good art only comes from dark places - when you think of great singers you don't think of happy pop songs,' lang says. 'But because of Ingenue everyone got on this longing thing. From a personal point of view I don't feel that much longing but it makes for the best ballads. However, when I was writing Ingenue I was involved in an unrequited love sort of thing, so then I focus on that and I extract every ounce of conceptual juice that I can get out of it. So then it seems like this big role. It's like that when I did the country stuff, everyone thought I must have been a real cowgirl but it's just that I become an actor or I really study the intricacies and the emotional spectrum of something when I'm doing it.'
In which case, lang got to have it all with Ingenue, bringing into play both head and heart, hummable tunes and heartache, irony and sincerity, for one beguiling pop-culture moment. It went platinum, selling two million records, won her a third Grammy, and made lang, at 31, the girl everyone wanted to hang out with. Suddenly it was, 'Oh, you're great! Wear my clothes! Come to this party! Go out with me because I'm beautiful!' and she fell into it all - all the 'glamorous model types and craziness' - with abandon. She was like her 10-year-old self let loose on her father's chocolate counter all over again. 'I was completely wild,' she says.
Then she started noticing that even straight women were flirting with her. In restaurants she would catch them glancing over at her 'and sort of swishing around me'. And at first she'd think, 'This beautiful creature is totally into me! Yahoo!' but gradually it all got to her. 'There was one instance where it had been building like a stack of cards, and this last card just did it all for me. And that was performing at the Los Angeles premiere party for Unzipped, the Isaac Mizrahi film. There was this big hoopla with all these models, and I was performing. It was just an awful experience for me. It was my fault because I had this preconceived notion of what it was going to be. But it was that moment when I went, "Oh, man. This is all just so fleeting and disposable and so superficial." Obviously not in its entirety - I love the failures as much as I love the successes - but that was a very stark moment.'
If Elvis was alive and well and beautiful, then this was definitely her Vegas period, and she followed up Ingenue in 1995 with All You Can Eat, a record about super-stuffed stardom. If on Ingenue lang had sung of 'constant craving', on All You Can Eat she sang about what happened when craving gave way to satiation - about 'wanting it all' and getting it. 'The whole concept on All You Can Eat was it's just this big smorgasbord and you don't really care if the food's good; it's just about all this shit you can pick from at the buffet. That stance was an act of defiance - it was me going, "I don't care. I don't care about fame. I don't care about whether you accept homosexuality or vegetarianism or anything." It was an act of reclaiming.'
Inevitably, the record did poorly - at least by the standards set by Ingenue - and lang retreated, went into therapy for a bit, and rethought. It would be five years before she next recorded an album of original material. 'That was the first break I'd had in many, many years,' she says. 'I bought this place and just started to slow down and take stock. This is actually my first house. I mean, I've bought stuff before but it had never been just mine - my sister lives in my Vancouver house - so it was a nice feeling and it made me start to slow down and reassess.'
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She coasted along in her public role as the nation's First Lady of Lesbianism and made guest appearances in the television shows Dharma & Greg and Ellen (whom she beat out of the closet by five years). She made Drag, a possibly rather over-cranial concept album of covers about smoking, and she found herself a girlfriend in the form of Leisha Hailey, the singer of the all-girl band the Murmurs, whom she met at a friend's birthday party in 1996.
They broke up shortly after the release in 2000 of Invincible Summer, a record celebrating their relationship on which lang sang of her 'neverending summer fling' and being as 'calm as I ever have been' to an accompaniment of surfer-music guitars, Mamas-and-Papas harmonies and beach-blanket bongoes. 'I was there in interviews saying, "This is it, this is the one," ' lang says a little ruefully. 'Well, that's what you get, right? Now I'm convinced that you shouldn't talk about your relationships to the press. It's kind of ironic, kind of beautiful in a way, that the happy-happy record ended so tragically.'
Since then, lang says she's had 'a couple' of romances, and while she won't be drawn on whether she currently has a girlfriend, you rather suspect that lang's mind is elsewhere these days. 'Happiness is a peace you make with your own psyche,' she says. 'So relationships teach you to open the corridors and closets of your own personality that you've been ignoring, but it's really about your own mind.'
The most important relationship in her life, you feel, will always be with that voice - supple, luxuriant. There have always seemed to be two people in this career - kd lang and the voice of kd lang, with the two of them playing off one another, sometimes to sly subversive effect, at other times in co-harmonious tandem. 'I certainly have felt that at certain points of my life,' she says. 'But I would say less and less; the older I get the less duality there is.' She points to her latest CD. 'Once I settled on the decision to do these songs really, really simply and not to try and do them big, or not worrying about the arrangements or making them clever - really focusing on the song itself, and not trying to superimpose my personality on these songs, but sing them from a recollective emotional place - it all came into place.'
There are no winks on this record, I suggest.
'Is there not one wink on this record?' she asks a little incredulous, picking up the CD to scan the track listing.
Well, there must be one, I backtrack.
'No. There isn't. There's not one wink. It's my first wink-free record.' And she laughs that big throaty, kd lang laugh which suggests that nothing could be further from the truth.
- 'Hymns of the 49th Parallel' (Nonesuch Records) is released on September 27. kd lang is touring the UK in November and December
