K. D. Lang

Canadian singer-songwriter

• Born: November 2, 1961
• Place of Birth: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

A Grammy-winning singer and songwriter, k.d. lang achieved success in country as well as alternative pop music while challenging gender stereotypes in the entertainment industry. She was one of the first mainstream musical artists to come out as lesbian, and became a prominent advocate for LGBTQ rights as well as other social causes.

Early Life

K.d. lang, who stylizes her name with lower-case letters, was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and was reared with her three older siblings in Consort, a town of almost seven hundred people in the eastern central plains of Alberta. Her father, Fred, purchased and operated the town pharmacy, and her mother, Audrey, taught elementary school.

Supported by her parents, especially her mother, lang began to sing at local music festivals when she was five years old, and she continued to perform at school shows and weddings until she finished high school. At the age of seven, she started weekly piano lessons in the town of Castor (about an hour’s drive from Consort), but after three years she switched to playing the guitar. Throughout her childhood, she listened to a wide variety of musical genres, ranging from classical music to Broadway tunes to rock and roll.

Lang’s parents also taught her to challenge stereotypes and gender roles. She actively participated in sports as a javelin thrower and volleyball player. Although her father left the family when lang was twelve years old, she had a close relationship with him before his departure, and from him she learned how to ride motorcycles and target shoot. She also exhibited a nonconformist sense of fashion, wearing leather pants and favoring hippie headbands and sunglasses.

Life’s Work

When she was eighteen, lang left Consort to study music and voice at Red Deer College, ninety miles south of Edmonton, but the combination of her frustration with academic requirements and job opportunities in Edmonton led her to quit college and pursue a career as an entertainer. Her early work was eclectic and included performance art, but increasingly she defined herself as a country music singer.

This identity was strengthened in 1981, when lang appeared in Edmonton in a musical, Country Chorale, playing a part loosely modeled on American country singer Patsy Cline, who had died in a plane crash in 1963. lang felt strongly drawn to Cline as an artistic role model and especially appreciated the pain-filled songs of lost love for which Cline had been famous. Lang also continued to defy convention and to develop her own distinctive style. She began to use her first and middle initials instead of Kathy Dawn, and to spell her name entirely in lower-case letters. She also drew attention with her unusual stage costumes, which combined heavy socks and boots with long square-dance skirts or false sideburns with a cowboy hat.

In 1982, lang auditioned for and received a job as vocalist for an Edmonton country swing group, but when the band folded after one public performance, she decided to form her own group. With the help of Larry Wanagas, an Edmonton recording studio owner who became her manager, Lang created the Reclines, a group that began to play at Edmonton nightclubs.

In 1984, lang and the Reclines released A Truly Western Experience on the independent Bunstead label and toured Canada to promote the album. Initially, lang and the Reclines appeared in smaller Canadian cities. Her act combined an exotic blend of country crooning and rockabilly with vigorous dancing and light-hearted clowning. These elements, plus her gender-bending style (enhanced by a new, close-cropped hairstyle), seemed to puzzle audiences. Some wondered if Lang’s performances were serious efforts at country music or humorous spoofs of the genre. In Toronto, however, she and her band found enthusiastic audiences and received good reviews. Based on this success in a major urban center, Lang and the Reclines were booked in 1985 at the Bottom Line, a well-known New York City nightclub. After watching Lang perform, Seymour Stein of Sire Records, famous for his interest in offbeat musical performers, signed her to a recording contract.

Angel with a Lariat (1986), lang’s first album with Sire, sold more than 460,000 copies and brought her a JUNO Award as Canada’s best Country Female Vocalist. On that album and her next for Sire, Shadowland (1988), lang offered mixtures of country music standards (rearranged to feature her energetic “cowpunk” style) and tunes cowritten by lang and Ben Mink, a member of the Reclines. She also paid homage to Cline with deeply emotional torch songs and through her choice of Owen Bradley, Cline’s longtime producer, as the producer of Shadowland. The torch songs enabled lang to use her rich voice to full advantage and to develop a romantic quality in her performances.

Lang began to win both a large audience and praise from much of the music industry. Shadowland sold more than a million copies and won praise from numerous critics, as did her next Sire album, Absolute Torch and Twang (1989). Lang also won the Grammy Award for best country vocal collaboration in 1988, for her duet with Roy Orbison on a remake of his hit song “Crying,” and the 1989 Grammy for best country female vocal performance for Absolute Torch and Twang.

Such success, however, did not translate into full acceptance in the ranks of country music. Centered in Nashville, Tennessee, the country music industry did not respond with uniform enthusiasm to lang’s willingness to combine country tunes with blues, rock, and punk music. Her unwillingness to conform to industry standards of what a female performer was expected to look like also drew criticism, as did her growing reputation as a model of female independence and strength. Although some notable individual country performers, including Minnie Pearl, Brenda Lee, and Loretta Lynn, did embrace lang and work with her, few country radio stations would play her songs. Despite this lackluster response from mainstream country supporters, Lang continued to expand her base of fans, especially among lesbians, enthusiasts of alternative pop music, and critics writing for publications such as Rolling Stone and The New York Times. She toured widely in North America and Europe to promote her albums, and developed a strong reputation as a live performer whose concerts strongly engaged and affected her audiences.

The year 1990 brought new levels of acclaim—and new controversy—for lang. Although the Country Music Awards continued to ignore her, Lang won a 1990 Grammy for Best female country vocalist. She also recorded a television commercial at the request of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). In the commercial, lang spoke strongly against the beef industry and meat-eating. A longtime vegetarian, lang referred to her own upbringing in the cattle country of Alberta and bluntly stated, “Meat stinks.” Furor over the advertisement developed before its planned release, and although it aired only on news programs, Lang became notorious for her statements. Although her animal rights activism did not seem to damage her reputation with most of her fans and won strong approval from some, it did give country music another reason to reject her. Many country radio stations in Canada and the United States announced that they would no longer play her music (even though most never had).

Rather than run from such condemnation, lang took new paths in her career and life. In 1991 she released Harvest of Seven Years (Cropped and Chronicled), a compilation of her videos and taped performances since 1984. She tried dramatic acting in Salmonberries (1992), a film directed by Percy Adlon and set in Alaska and Berlin. Lang played an Inuit woman in love with a German widow, and while the film saw limited release, lang’s performance won praise and increased her lesbian fan base. She would later appear in a few small roles in film and television but firmly declared that she did not see herself as an actor. In her fifth album, Ingenue (1992), lang abandoned most of her country sound and instead featured her voice in ten yearning and introspective love songs, all cowritten by lang and Mink.

Both Salmonberries and Ingenue led to increased rumors about lang’s sexual orientation, since she portrayed a lesbian in the former and sang of unrequited passion in the latter. In an interview in the summer of 1992, she eliminated the rumors by clearly stating that she was lesbian. She explained that her earlier reticence to publicly come out reflected her concern that her mother, who had been targeted by hate mail following Lang’s PETA advertisement, would suffer an additional round of attacks.

Lang’s openness about her sexual orientation did not have a negative effect on her popularity as a singer and songwriter. She regularly expressed her satisfaction at having contributed to the wider public recognition of lesbian, gay, and bisexual artists and public figures. Lang also spoke about the rewards she had discovered through embracing her sense of difference and seeing herself as an “anomaly,” suggesting that having to struggle against prejudices or others’ expectations had given her work more depth. At the same time, lang increasingly made it clear in interviews that she wanted to be seen as a singer and musician, rather than be stereotyped as a “gay activist” simply because she was an out lesbian.

In 1993, lang won a Grammy for best female pop vocal for “Constant Craving,” a single from Ingenue. The album achieved platinum status in sales, and “Constant Craving” reached the Top Ten on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart and Top 100 Singles chart. Lang and Mink also wrote the soundtrack for Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1994). Critics and fans alike applauded lang’s shift toward a blues-based crooning vocal style that emphasized emotional expression and the richness of her voice.

Lang’s next two albums, All You Can Eat (1995) and Drag (1997), sold fewer copies than Ingenue, and lang significantly reduced her public performances in the period between 1996 and 2000. She saw this time as a chance for her to reassess her commitment to music as an art form, rather than a source of celebrity or notoriety. Both All You Can Eat and Drag had continued the yearning, lovelorn themes of “Constant Craving” in many ways. Recognizing that her sudden, major success with Ingenue had the potential to trap her into stale efforts to repeat the same format, lang experimented with a bouncy, lighter musical style in Invincible Summer, released in 2000 to considerable critical acclaim and generating stronger sales than the previous two recordings.

Lang also returned to the touring circuit, serving as an opening act for major performers such as Sting and reestablishing lengthy tours as a headliner. Her first concert album, Live by Request (2001), reflected lang’s renewed enthusiasm for direct engagement with her listeners. Reflecting her Grammy-winning success in pairing with Orbison more than a decade earlier, lang also returned to duets in a tribute to Louis Armstrong with Tony Bennett, releasing A Wonderful World (2002). The pair won the Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album in 2003.

By that point in her career lang had long been recognized as an important performer and artist in Canada, which decorated her as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1996. With Hymns of the Forty-ninth Parallel (2004), lang returned the honor by recording songs created by some of Canada’s most esteemed songwriters. Noting that she had learned much from listening to fellow Canadians over the years, she built the album primarily around her personal favorites, including Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Jane Siberry, and Leonard Cohen. Marking yet another step forward in her effort to find fresh approaches to her career, lang’s tour to promote Hymns of the Forty-Ninth Parallel matched her with symphony orchestras. Canada’s JUNO Music Awards ceremony in 2005 showcased lang’s performance of Young’s “Helpless,” and in that same year Canada’s National Arts Centre selected her for its award for exceptional achievement in a single year.

Circling back once more to revisit and expand some of her earlier work, lang released Reintarnation (2006), an album teaming her again with Mink and centering on some of their most successful songs from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Decidedly a country album, the recording still incorporated many of the musical experiments and journeys that lang took in the years separating her early career from her work as a mature artist. The title reflected her penchant for blending new styles and approaches with older songs and traditional musical genres. In 2008, she released Watershed, her first album of original songs since 2000, and in 2011, an album entitled Sing It Loud, with a band she put together, Siss Boom Bang. In between those two albums she released a compilation album entitled Recollection. Also in 2010, lang performed a rendition of Leonard Cohen's oft-covered song "Hallelujah" at the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics, held in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Lang continued to make sporadic appearances and releases through the late 2010s and into the 2020s. She collaborated with Neko Case, an alternative country-rock musician, and singer-songwriter Laura Veirs on their eponymous album case/lang/veirs, which was released in June 2016 and won the 2016 AllMusic Year in Review Favorite Folk and America Album award. In 2021 she released Makeover, comprising remixes from 1992 through 2000.

Significance

Lang forged an unusually wide-ranging musical career through her commitment to musical innovation and her ability to fuse and blend different styles in her songwriting and performances. Her early work drew new listeners to country music and broadened the image of country performers. With her song “Constant Craving,” lang also established herself as a pop vocalist and ballad singer. Never a captive to her own success, lang moved from the multimillion sales of Ingenue to explore her own skills in experiments that varied markedly in their commercial success but consistently reflected her own refusal to be pigeonholed as a singer and performer.

Beyond her contributions to popular music and alongside a variety of other performers, lang challenged gender stereotypes and helped prove that female performers could draw fans and praise without conforming to a particular model of appearance or behavior. Although lang always defined herself as a musician first and a social activist second, her advocacy of animal rights and openness about her sexual orientation remain significant aspects of her public image. In the twenty-first century, as young artists regularly blended musical genres and styles, lang continued to be one of the most prominent examples of an artist committed to honesty and independence in both her work and her public life. In 2024, the Canadian Country Music Association announced that lang would be inducted into its Music Hall of Fame in September 2024.

Bibliography

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Trapunski, Richard. "k.d. lang To Be Inducted Into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame in 2024." Billboard, 26 June 2024, ca.billboard.com/music/country/k-d-lang-canadian-country-music-hall-of-fame. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.