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WONDER GIRL OF THE NORTH COUNTRY
SHE MAY HAVE BEEN CUT FROM THE SAME CLOTH AS AMERICAN MUSIC ICONS PASTY CLINE AND ROY ORBISON, BUT K.D. LANG HAS NEVER FORGOTTEN HER CANADIAN ROOTS

K.D. LANG
By Josef Woodard
NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT

She may have cut her teeth on a healthy diet of American songs and sounds. She may have originally made her name with a form of pre-alternative country and given a bold new voice to classics by Pasty Cline and Roy Orbison. She may presently reside in Los Angeles, but k.d. lang has never forgotten her Canadian roots, the subject at the richly resonant core of her latest album, "Hymns of the 49th Parallel."

The critically acclaimed album represents a new level of maturity for lang, born in Consort, Alberta, Canada, in 1961, and by general consensus one of the greatest and most confident musical voices of our time. She can inject songs with a unique blend of vulnerability and heroic fire, as she'll doubtlessly show local audiences when she performs at the Arlington Theatre on Sunday. She was last in town as part of a tour supporting her last, more openly commercial album, "Invincible Summer," in 2000.

Aside from the new album's musical potency, propped up with her impressive readings of songs by such towering Canadian-born songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen, the disc also finds lang herself bumping up - or across - the music world. It marks a new career chapter, switching from her longtime home with Warner Brothers to the respected, eclectic American label Nonesuch (which also, incidentally, gave a new happy home to another Warner Brothers refugee, Wilco).

Since the album's release, lang and company have been touring the globe tirelessly, usually joined by orchestras of varying sizes. One Santa Barbaran intimately aware of lang's busy schedule this past year is her bassist, David Piltch. The remarkably fluid and versatile Canadian-born musician has lived with his family in Santa Barbara for a decade, and has played with lang for longer than that.

Recently, lang spoke from home about life and culture in Canada, her morphing music career, and more.

QUESTION: Your latest album is a thing of beauty, and it sounds even better since the election. Canada is looking a lot more attractive to a lot of blue state Americans right now.
ANSWER: Really? (She laughs). Well, I wish I could have given everyone immigration papers and the CD at the same time.

Q: When you were devising the song list for "Hymns of the 49th Parallel," was it a difficult task paring down to this set of songs, given the idea that you were trying to represent Canada's finest?
A: It actually was pretty easy, because they had to meet two criteria. They had to be my favorite songs and they had to fit into the theme of the album and the title "Hymns of the 49th Parallel," so they had to be spiritually based. I really focused on songs that I thought were sort of spiritually based, and based in nature, as well. They use a lot of natural images. So it was pretty easy.

I did a lot of research for the record, but I came back to my original song list, which is pretty much what's on the album.

Q: When you think of great Canadian songwriters, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen come to mind, but it was also great to hear you covering a lesser-known but respected artist like Jane Siberry.
A: Yeah, she actually is one of my very, very favorite Canadian songwriters, one of my favorite songwriters ever. She writes from a very compassionate point-of-view and she is also very quirky and artistic. Her lyrics give you a lot of different directions to go in.

Q: She was briefly on Warner Brothers, in the late 1980s, around the same time you were a new arrival on the label. As you say, she's got this quirky, creative side to her: Is that a liability, in terms of the commercial music world?
A: It depends where you're putting your money, but yeah, if you're putting it in a big corporation that focuses on big pop singles, then that's not the place for you. But in terms of art and longevity, she represents us well.

Q: You also do a song by Ron Sexsmith, another artist deserving greater recognition.
A: Yeah, I put Ron in to suggest that the tradition of great Canadian songwriting continues. Ron is a really good example of how it is not a generational thing. It's a cultural thing, and it continues.

Q: You have been a songwriter for years, but do you define yourself more as a singer at this point?
A: I'm definitely defining myself more as a singer. However, interpretation and songwriting, for me, play off of each other and help me understand more about (music). One helps the other. Being an interpreter helps my understanding of being a songwriter, and vice versa. Both are very different but equally important artistic statements. I just see myself as a singer, foremost, but I will probably go back and forth the rest of my life.

Q: If you just look back at the history of pop vocalists and go back a mere few decades, the scene has changed so radically. It was only in the '60s that the hyphenate singer-songwriter identity popped up. Before that, singers generally didn't write songs, right?
A: That's right. The Canadian songbook is a really good example, compared to the American songbook, how different that is for interpretation. The American songbook is constructed from the era of songwriters writing for singers and the Canadian songbook kind of stems from singer-songwriters, and the quintessential version already exists. So it's a question and is kind of ominous to tackle in the Canadian songbook, and wonder why you even need to.

But I really felt that, as a vocalist and as a proud Canadian, it was important to cultivate these songs as standard, to move them forward and put them in the light of a "songbook."

Q: That's an interesting idea, that actually those cherished Canadian songwriters - especially Mitchell, Young and Cohen - helped to forge the whole singer-songwriter aesthetic. Is there something about the Canadian spirit, or landscape, behind that fact?
A: Per capita, Canada has produced a tremendous amount of successful musicians. There's a thread of continuity there. This initially started my concept for this record. I think it has a lot to do with the environment of Canada, its vast, open landscape and the lack of population, the long, long winters, which is conducive to introspective thinking and isolation. I think Canadians write from that point of view quite a lot.

Q: Your own song, "Simple," written with David Piltch, is also very moving. It's sort of an anthemic prayer, in a way. What led to writing that?
A: We wrote it for "Invincible Summer" and my manager and some friends said, "Well, are you going to put any of your own stuff on this album?" I initially said no, but they talked me into it. I chose "Simple" because I thought it worked, thematically, and I really wanted to hear that with the strings. It fit into the concept very nicely. It's a beautiful little song.

Q: As you well know, Tony Bennett, whom you toured with two years ago, thinks the world of you. Has that relationship been a rewarding and unusual one for you?
A: Amazing, with everything you can think of in terms of the benefits, Tony Benefits. (She laughs.) (That includes) being led into the American songbook by someone who helped create it and to tour with Tony and be around him and see his professionalism and his elegance. There's also all the singing stuff, his phrasing and his absolute perfection in terms of old-school entertaining. That's an education that you can't buy.

But beyond that, just to have a real creative friendship with someone who's that much your elder is very enriching, and quite rare and precious.

Q: That's true: there isn't much interaction between the artistic generations these days. In your career arc, maybe you've now passed the first youthful burst and are now in your full stride as an artist. Has that been a tricky transition to deal with?
A: It's not tricky now, but leading up to it, yeah. There was a coming-down over the last several years, after "Ingenue" (1992), and right up until maybe three or four years ago. I knew that I was in decline in the pop world and shifting into something new. It did take some doing, a lot of contemplation and letting go, and understanding how to continue.

The middle part of a long career is the very hardest. I just followed my instincts, made kooky records, turned sideways and upside down and this and that way. I think I reached an epiphany after "Invincible Summer" and concentrated on opportunities that arose. I concentrated on singing and the music, most importantly, and not trying so hard to sell records, but just making really good records. The switch from Warner Brothers to Nonesuch has really marked a newfound existence in my career. I feel like it's a real safe, secure place for me to mature into my own. I feel honored to be on a label with that much credibility.

Q: It sounds like everything is coming together for you at the moment?
A: I feel like it is, although everything is also fragile and impermanent. I'm extremely grateful for where I'm at right now.