kd lang

The five of us – me and my wife G, Eric and his wife-to-be Susan, and our friend Russell – made our way across the parking lot and joined the crowd that was forming outside the Universal Amphitheater. I had long ago given up going to see big venue music concerts – about the time I saw Peter Gabriel’s Security tour in Chicago in 1982 and paid a gob of money to sit a mile from the stage and listen to some drunk fan sing Shock the Monkey really badly – but this was a special occasion. T-shirt vendors had set up booths near the entrance and people were lining up to buy souvenir programs, but none of that interested us. We came because we just wanted to hear kd lang sing.

I was first turned onto kd lang while living in Brooklyn. (And for the record, it is kd, not KD, just like old man ee, although I’m not sure if it’s for the same reason.) An acquaintance of mine played some of Shadowland for me, and I was immediately smitten. This was not long after I had finally given up my knee-jerk reaction to country music as a result of listening to Patsy Cline. So it’s no surprise that Shadowland caught my ear, as it was produced by Owen Bradley, the producer largely responsible for the groundbreaking sound of Patsy Cline. Owen Bradley dusted off country music and smoothed its rough edges – gave it a new suit and invited it into the concert hall. Although many purists regarded his arrangements as blasphemous, the lush strings and tinkling pianos he added to county music helped it gain a wider audience and, ultimately, helped make it the most popular form of music in America. Of course, it wasn’t all Owen – Patsy certainly had something to do with it – but he established the “countrypolitan” sound and it’s for that reason that kd sought him out.

kd lang didn’t win many fans with her early claim that she was Patsy Cline reincarnated. Patsy was, after all, one of the saints of country music, preserved forever by dying young, and it was one thing to say that you were inspired by her, but quite another to say you were her. But if anybody could pull of that assertion, it was kd lang, who possesses one of the most glorious voices I’ve ever heard. I rushed out and bought Shadowland and its follow-up, the wonderful Absolute Torch and Twang, shortly before leaving Brooklyn.

If I was smitten with kd lang, my wife-to-be G was swept off her feat and thrown on the back of a wild stallion and dragged away across the countryside, never to be seen again. G has always had a fondness for altos, the dusky female voice lights fires in her soul, but kd took the cake, and G was positively mesmerized. It’s easy to understand, really. Her voice is as strong as steel and as smooth as mayonnaise. She’s got perfect control and perfect pitch, but she doesn’t sound like the sanitized clinically perfect classically trained voices that I hate. At the bottom of her astonishing technique is an undeniable well of human emotion, and it’s this potent combination that makes her such a powerful singer.

After Absolute Torch and Twang, kd would change directions to reach a larger audience – much like Eurythmics did after 1984. But where the Eurythmics were leaving behind their new-wave synth pop roots to graze larger, greener pastures, kd turned away from the music that nurtured her as a youth and that her core audience loved her for, country music. It’s a risky move, trying to broaden your horizons at the possible expensive of your fans, but it’s what drives the creative process, and many artists would rather starve following their muse than be locked in a gilded cage, bitterly singing the same song over and over again.