Singer, songwriter

Her music has been called cow-punk or new wave country. With her spiked short hair and cut-off cowboy boots, she looks like a cross between Dale Evans and Johnny Rotten. Canadian singer K.D. Lang transcends easy labelling but one thing is certain—her expressive voice and wild stage shows are bringing a whole new generation of listeners back to country music. With the release of her third album, Shadowland, Lang joined young singers like Dwight Yoakam and Randy Travis as new stars in the country music firmament. But unlike Yoakam, a country purist who rejects Nashville "schmaltz," Lang embraces both the old and the new. While some have called her unusual renderings of classic tunes campy or even sarcastic, Lang insists her music is sincere.

Kathy Dawn Lang, who likes to go by K.D., seems to have a broad appeal. She has garnered standing ovations everywhere from Vancouver punk clubs to the Grand Ole Opry. The Nashville Banner called her "one of the most exciting new artists to come around in a while." At the same time, Rolling Stone applauded her already "legendary" live performances. Among her many influences, Lang lists Patsy Cline and Boy George. This eclecticism has its drawbacks. She has yet to have a major hit record because radio programmers have a difficult time slotting her in their playlists. Edmonton, Alberta, music director Larry Donohue summed up the problem in Western Report, "A lot of her stuff isn't country enough to go country, and it isn't pop enough to go pop." And Robert K. Oermann, music critic for the Tennessean, explained, "She is in some kind of weird place between artsy new wave and country."

Lang's focus, however, seems to be narrowing as her music matures. She has discarded some of her props, like the Elvis Costello horn-rimmed glasses and the rhinestone-studded cowboy skirts. She says she doesn't want to become known simply as an "act" like Bette Midler's Divine Miss M. Her concern may be warranted. The Nashville Banner once referred to her as a singer with "Patsy Cline's sublime power . . . inside Pee Wee Herman's mind."

K.D. Lang has country roots. She was born Katherine Dawn Lang in 1961 in the tiny town of Consort (pop. 672), Alberta, Canada. Her father ran the local drug-store and her mother was the second grade school-teacher. As a teenager, K.D. earned summer money driving a three-ton grain truck for local farmers. But despite her rural surroundings, Lang's early musical influences were not country. She trained on classical piano and listened to her older sister's rock music collection. "I grew up not liking country music," she told Jay Scott in Chatelaine. "I was brought up in a family that studied classical music, at the piano. We also listened to Broadway shows. And I listened to Janis Joplin and the Allman Brothers." Besides music, young Kathy Dawn was interested in athletics. She was able on the volleyball court, and she claims her first professional ambition was to be a roller derby queen. Later, in college, she dabbled in performance art. She played in productions that ranged from a seven hour re-enactment of Barney Clark's plastic heart transplant to filling up an art gallery with garbage.

But music remained her first love. As a teenager, she was a would-be professional, doing numbers like "Midnight Blue" and the "Circle Game" on her acoustic guitar at weddings and other functions. At college, she discovered the music of Patsy Cline, whose emotional approach drew Lang back to the golden age of country, when singers like Johnny Horton and Hank Williams sang simple tributes to the everyday life of ordinary people.

In 1982 she answered an ad in an Edmonton newspaper for a singer for a Texas swing fiddle band. Her future manager, Larry Wanagas, was at the audition. He knew immediately that a unique talent was ready to be developed. "The first show she did," he told Perry Stem in Canadian Musician magazine, "surprised herself as well as me. I knew she could sing, but what she brought to the stage was this undeniable presence."

For the next two years, Lang and her band, the Reclines, toured throughout Canada. They played country, college, and rock bars. K.D. would stomp out wearing ugly, rhinestone-studded glasses (without lenses) and cowboy boots with the tops sawn off. She would fling herself to the stage in the middle of her version of the 1960s girl-pop classic "Johnny Get Angry." But no matter how contorted her hijinks, her voice rang deep and melodious. She was clearly capable of vocal gymnastics, tumbling from a full-throated alto line one moment to a yelping yodel the next. It didn't take long for the word to spread—this weird-looking woman from the plains of Alberta was singing country tunes like they had never been sung before.

Her first album, A Truly Western Experience, was recorded during this period on an independent Edmonton label. It showed that her voice could be transposed successfully to vinyl, but it didn't sell well. Then, in the spring of 1985, after playing a gig at New York's Bottom Line club, the head of Sire Records signed her to his label. Seymour Stein was already recording the Talking Heads, Madonna, the Pretenders, and the Ramones. After witnessing her Bottom Line show, he decided she was ready for big-time exposure. "You are what should have happened to country music 30 years ago, " he told her at the time.

Her star was on the rise. In November, she was named Canada's "most promising female vocalist." But in 1986, Lang disappeared from the concert circuit. When she reappeared, she had abandoned the persona that had won her headlines. A restrained, new Kathy Dawn Lang emerged, without the cat glasses and the studied attempts to make herself ugly. "The reason I've tempered my style is because I'm taking my music more seriously," Lang told Western Report. "I'm tired of being written about as some zany, crazy kid. I think the gap between K.D. and Kathy has lessened to the point where I'm almost completely Kathy on stage now." Lang clearly sought to defy the critics who doubted her artistic commitment.

Lang's second album, but first major release, Angel With a Lariat, was the product of K.D.'s new devotion to her music. It was a complex collection of Lang's own pieces and country classics, like Patsy Cline's heartbreaker "Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray." Produced in England by rocker Dave Edmunds, it featured the spontaneity of a live performance. And at the same time, it strove to recapture the honesty and purity that Lang found lacking in contemporary country music. The reviews were generous. The Toronto Globe and Mail, for example, called the production "a breathlessly paced, musically adventurous album that's unlike anything in contemporary or rock music."

With the release of her first major commercial effort, K.D. began to look south of the Canadian border. In May, 1987, she made her television debut on "The Tonight Show." Johnny Carson was so impressed that he invited her back three times. She quickly became a television regular, appearing on the Smothers Brothers' program, "Late Night with David Letterman," "Hee Haw," and on pay-TV alongside Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello. She also teamed up with music legend Roy Orbison to record a stirring version of the rock veteran's classic ballad "Crying." Their co-production sold more than 50,000 copies in the United States. Nonetheless, major radio airplay still seemed to elude Lang.

In the summer of 1988, Lang released the album that was to feature her vocal talents in a way that Angel With a Lariat never did. Shadowland was produced by country legend Owen Bradley, the man who developed Patsy Cline's talent. Indeed, Shadowland seemed to be a coming-to-terms of Lang's long-time obsession with her mentor and role model. None of the songs on the album are her own. Instead, they are nostalgic, sincere interpretations of emotional ballads known in the country music business as "weepers." There is no wacky sarcasm in these songs; one track, "Honky Tonk Angels' Medley," features country stars who are former Bradley protegees and contemporaries of Cline.

The album has done well, garnering respectable sales and laudatory reviews. Rolling Stone called it a celebration of country music, and Maclean's suggested the collection of Nashville classics was "richly nostalgic" and "a major turning point." A single from the album, Patsy Cline's "I'm Down to My Last Cigarette," climbed both the country and pop charts. And it has been credited with sparking a revival of interest in Cline's work. Her label, MCA Records, has re-released Cline's greatest-hits collection and has issued two previously unreleased recordings.

Her 1989 release, Absolute Torch and Twang, "splits the difference between the unbridled high spirits... of Angel With a Lariat and the more studied, Patsy Cline-influenced studioscapes crafted by legendary country producer Owen Bradley on Shadowland," noted Holly Gleason in a Rolling Stone review. "There are more obvious records Lang could have made," Gleason continued, "ones designed to make her a country queen. Instead, she opted for songs that challenge her abilities and make a case for artistic vision. . . . This album isn't gonna win her any points with the Nashville Network or country-radio programmers, but it shows what country music, when intelligently done, can be."

Lang continues to defy the easy labels. Even without her spiked hair, K.D. Lang stands in stark contrast to the pronounced femininity of Nashville's female country artists. She may mimic country music's golden years, but her mannish looks do not fit in with the bouffant hairstyles of earlier times. When Chatelaine magazine chose Lang as it's 1988 Woman of the Year, she defiantly posed for the magazine cover without makeup. "I am a woman of the 1980s and have been influenced by punk and Boy George," she explained to Maclean's magazine.

—Ingeborg Boyens