Ingénue

Mink said that Nashville still had the door closed to them in country, so they decided to do exactly what they wanted. He described the sound as post-nuclear cabaret. He had played in a klezmer band, and the accordion felt natural to him. He also had an old photograph of his parents after the war, having wine with friends beside an accordion player and a violin player, and when he showed it to lang she said that was what the album should sound like. Greg Leisz's steel guitar was used carefully as a bridge from Absolute Torch and Twang, and Gary Burton's vibraphone took the music somewhere else. The cover echoes that of The Essential Marlene Dietrich, whom Mink named as a huge vocal influence on lang at the time.

Mink and lang wrote and demoed the songs in the summer and fall of 1991 in a rented house in Vancouver's Chinatown, with a rented AKG 414 microphone, a Tascam board and a Tascam 16-track. A first attempt at tracking with a small band at Vancouver Studios did not work. Penny said it lasted about five minutes, and Mink said Miss Chatelaine sounded like a really bad bar mitzvah group. Mink rebuilt the songs from acoustic guitar and a click, as on the demos, and he put the share of the demos on the finished record at about 30 percent. The drummer Randall Stoll, suggested by the engineer Marc Ramaer, re-tracked four or five songs in a couple of days. Work moved to a new studio when Bob Rock took over the first room, and mixing was done at Skip Saylor Recording in Los Angeles.

In Pitchfork in 2019 Laura Snapes called it an album about purgatory and said lang described its sound as nouveau easy listening as well as post-nuclear cabaret. At the 25th anniversary lang said that its sometimes obtuse nature felt like protection, a prison and a comfort zone at once. The album reached number 3 in the UK, number 18 on the Billboard 200 and number 1 in New Zealand, number 3 in Australia and number 13 in Canada. It was certified double platinum in the US, Canada and Australia and platinum in the UK. It was nominated for the Grammy for Album of the Year and for Best Engineered Non-Classical Album. A 25th anniversary edition appeared on Nonesuch in 2017.