k.d. lang

Alberta

Kathryn Dawn Lang was born in Edmonton in 1961 and grew up in Consort, Alberta. At Red Deer College she became fascinated with Patsy Cline and decided to sing for a living. In 1983 she joined the label owner and manager Larry Wanagas to form a Cline tribute band, the Reclines. She took her lowercase stage name from the poet e. e. cummings. In 1983 she staged a performance-art piece re-enacting the transplant of an artificial heart, and in June 1985 Rolling Stone called her a Canadian Cowpunk. A Truly Western Experience appeared in 1984 and brought her national attention in Canada, and in 1985 she won the Juno Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist. Dave Edmunds produced Angel with a Lariat, released in 1987 as her first record outside Canada. A duet with Roy Orbison, Crying, came out as a single that year and won a Grammy.

Shadowland

Shadowland (1988) was made in Nashville with Owen Bradley, the producer of Patsy Cline's best-known work, at Bradley's Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn and Brenda Lee joined her on a medley of Honky Tonk Angels songs. Kristine McKenna of the Los Angeles Times thought lang sounded like a dead ringer for Cline but had held back from leaving her own thumbprint on the style. The Canadian Country Music Association named it Album of the Year in 1988, the year she sang at the closing ceremony of the Calgary Winter Olympics and added backing vocals, with Jennifer Warnes and Bonnie Raitt, to Orbison's television special A Black and White Night.

Absolute Torch and Twang (1989), her last record with the Reclines, produced Full Moon Full of Love, a number one on the Canadian country chart, and won a Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance.

Ingénue

With Ben Mink, whom she met in 1985, lang stopped chasing Nashville. Mink said they decided to do exactly what they wanted, and the result was Ingénue, released in March 1992. He called the sound post-nuclear cabaret and built it on accordion, violin, vibraphone and a carefully used steel guitar. The two wrote it in a rented house in Vancouver in 1991, and it was recorded at Vancouver Studios and mixed in Los Angeles. Laura Snapes of Pitchfork later called Outside Myself its most beautifully written song.

The closing track, Constant Craving, reached number 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album went to number 3 in the UK, number 18 in the US and number 1 in New Zealand, and was certified double platinum in the US and Canada. The song won the 1993 Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and Miss Chatelaine was nominated a year later. In 1997 the Rolling Stones released Anybody Seen My Baby? with a refrain so close to Constant Craving that Jagger and Richards credited lang and Mink as co-writers. Ingénue is also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

After Ingénue

Drag (1997) gathered covers built around a smoking motif. In 2004 she made Hymns of the 49th Parallel, songs by Canadian writers including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jane Siberry and Leonard Cohen. She went on to sing its version of Hallelujah at the 2005 Juno Awards and at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Watershed (2008) was her first collection of original songs since Invincible Summer in 2000 and entered the Billboard 200 at number 8. In 2016 she made case/lang/veirs with Neko Case and Laura Veirs.

For the 25th anniversary of Ingénue she toured the album in sequence and in its entirety. In 2019 she said she considered herself semi-retired. She entered the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2013, the Canadian Country Music Association announced her Hall of Fame induction in 2024, and in September 2024 she played with the Reclines at the association's awards in Edmonton.