Kd Lang Biography

Despite eschewing the traditional rhinestone country garb, and adopting a far more low-key approach both in her sound and her image, Lang gained a favourable reputation on the country scene, culminating in a Juno award in 1985 for Most Promising Female Vocalist. Though the Juno awards may make few waves outside of Canada, Lang had had sufficient success to move her career to the home of country, Nashville, and then to London, where she was to record most of another Reclines album, 'Angel with a Lariat' (1987) under the production guidance of Dave Edmunds.

The first major breakthrough of Lang's still-fledgling career came when Roy Orbison invited her to duet with him on a reworking of his classic 'Crying' in 1987, which gained Lang her first Grammy award (for best country collaboration) and further, well-deserved critical acclaim (although looking back now, she regrets the way she sang on the record).

Further Grammy success came with her next album, 'Absolute Torch and Twang' (1989), which gained her the Best Country Vocal gong. As the name suggests, the album was a collection of country torch songs, and sold relatively strongly both in Canada and in the US. However, it was when Lang made something of a leap from her country roots and adopted a more unashamedly pop approach that her major stardom began.

With the release of 1992's 'Ingénue', and stand out single 'Constant Craving', Lang suddenly became the name on everyone's lips - and not necessarily in a good way. On the one hand Lang won another Grammy, with Constant Craving picking up Best Pop Vocal (notably not country on this occasion), and with Lang's move to Los Angeles came the invites to all the best A-list parties. However, the new-found fame was a double-edged sword, with limelight-hungry celebs like Madonna clamouring to be associated with the flavour of the month singer. (Madonna once famously joked 'Elvis is alive, and she's beautiful', in reference to Lang, and let's all hope it gained Madonna some more of the attention for which she is so clearly desperate, even to this day).

The fact of Lang's sexuality had always been there, pretty much - and although she had come out to her mother at the age of 17, however, she had never felt the need to come out in public. The problem was the political climate in LA back then - with issues around the AIDS virus causing rampant homophobia on the one hand, and militant gay groups such as Queer nation outing people against their will on the other. Lang 'officially' came out in an interview with gay rights magazine 'The Advocate' in 1992. Also, anyone who still harboured any doubt over Lang's sexuality after a feted Rolling Stone cover she shot with Cindy Crawford in that year - for which Lang posed in an old-school barber's chair, her face lathered, whilst the supermodel, dressed in a swimsuit, prepared to shave the singer - probably needed their head read.

However, being 'out' and successful was not necessarily the holy grail it may have seemed for Lang. Looking back on this period of her life, Lang describes it as 'a sugar high' - famous, popular, snapped by the paps, and suddenly noticing that even straight women were giving her the eye in restaurants. A key point came for Lang when she was performing at a film premiere party, surrounded by models: '...it was that moment when I went, 'Oh, man. This is all just so fleeting and disposable and so superficial'.

Next album 'All You can Eat' (1995) was a suitably pithy commentary on the overblown and overfed nature of the fame that had fallen upon Lang - and unsurprisingly it failed to match the sales of Ingénue. Perhaps fans of Ingénue had expected more of the same atmospheric pop, but whatever the reason, Lang decided it was time to take a break, having toured relentlessly and worn herself into the ground.

She went into therapy, and bought herself a home in the hills above Los Angeles - no less than the cabin-style hideaway to which movie legend Rock Hudson would retreat with his secret gay lover Tab Hunter. Lang released a modestly successful concept album about smoking, teasingly entitled 'Drag' (1997), and also found herself a partner of her own, singer Leisha Hailey (of girl-group 'The Murmurs'), who she had met at a friend's birthday party.

'Invincible Summer' (2000) was a collection of songs centring fondly on her relationship with Hailey, however the pair broke up shortly after the album's release, prompting another period of introspection for Lang. In 2003 she was back on the Grammy rostrum, picking up an award for 'A Wonderful World', an album of Louis Armstrong covers, on which she duetted with lounge legend Tony Bennett the previous year. This was certainly Lang's 'covers era' - she hadn't release any albums of her own new work since 'Invincible Summer' back in 2000, and further continued this trend with 2004's 'Hymns of the 49th Parallel', a collection of compositions by fellow Canadians such as Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.

The need for covers could in no small part be attributed to chronic writer's block (Lang did call her own music publishing company 'Pulling Teeth', after all) - although recently Lang has reflected that covering other people's work for a sustained period of her career has enabled her both to concentrate on simplifying her vocal delivery, doing justice to the songs, and also to gain as much insight as possible into what makes for a great piece of song-writing.

Having re-released a collection of her earlier country work with 2006's 'Reintarnation', Lang has now put this new insight to good use, with her first album of her own original work in eight years. What will also have helped is that she has a new muse, in the form of a live-in long-term girlfriend who she refers to as her 'wife' (despite the two not actually being legally married). The 2008 release of 'Watershed', Lang's album of new songs, is likely to have broad appeal, as she describes the album as: '...a culmination of everything I've done -there's a little bit of jazz, a little country, a little of the 'Ingénue' sound, a little Brazilian touch. It really feels like the way I hear music, this mash-up of genres, and I think it reflects all the styles that have preceded this in my catalogue. I didn't feel the need to be genre-specific because this experience felt so wide open'.

• KD Lang Discography