LARRY SCHWARTZ
She lets her toes curl in rubber thongs. She wears frayed jeans and a flimsy top on a grey day that promises rain and thunder.
“I brought all the wrong clothes,” she says of the “beach clothes” she packed when departing sunny California. “I wasn’t even thinking.”
Not for the first time is k.d. lang cheerily out of sync. Lesbian, vegetarian, teetotaller and defiantly lower case, she still maintains she is an incarnation of the late great Patsy Cline.
With striking blue eyes and a dark tan, she munches contentedly on a chocolate biscuit in a city hotel, attributing her refusal to conform partly to childhood in Consort, a small, prairie town in the Canadian province of Alberta.
“I think it really cultivates your individuality,” she says, “contrary to what people believe small towns do.”
Her family get some credit, too. “Somehow it was encouraged in me to celebrate my differences and I did, and I still do.”
lang’s record company says she may be back to tour later this year. Meanwhile, she’s here to talk about a new album, Invincible Summer, inspired by a quote from Albert Camus: “In the depth of winter, I finally learnt that within me lay an invincible summer.”
“Summer is a mindset,” she says; not just a season but the way in which love “makes you feel like it’s summer all the time.”
She has endured a lengthy winter too. “I got burnt out,” she says. “Just work and work, work, work.”
Though she has long distanced herself from Nashville, emerging as lounge chanteuse on the 1992 album Ingenue, she first came to prominence as a country star.
The one and only time she strutted onstage at the Grand Ol’ Opry, she decided to fast because it happened to be the Jewish Day of Atonement.
Of Icelandic, German and Sioux Indian descent, her mother’s family were Jewish from Russia. “I only found out that I was Jewish years later,” says lang, who has delighted in the chutzpah of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys.
Almost a decade has past since she “went from the Canadian darling to public enemy number one” after she made an advertisement for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, saying: “If you knew how meat was made, you’d probably lose your lunch”.
Had she alienated her own crowd? “Oh God,” she says, laughing. “That’s a gross understatement.”
She declared her sexual preference publicly in a June, 1992, issue of the gay publication Advocate.
She readily comments, when asked, on whether homosexual couples would make good parents.
“I think that if a gay couple goes to the lengths and the amount of work and trouble to have a kid, that it shows to me a tenacity and a level of love and desire that a lot of children never experience.” She made an acting debut as a withdrawn Eskimo in love with an older woman in in Percy
Adlon’s late 1980s Salmonberries and had a role in Australian director Stephan Elliot’s Eye of the Beholder.
But she says she is “not an actress”. “It’s a different talent and I don’t possess it.”
“About two or three years ago, I got in my truck with my dog and drove home and stayed with my mum for a while,” lang says.
“I realised that the beauty of life really is the fact that my friends were still there and married to each other and have kids and they’ve had a very micro life and I`ve had a very macro life and they’re both beautiful.
“I appreciated both at that moment. I’m very lucky to have accomplished the things that I did.”
The Sunday Age, 02nd of July 2000
Larry Schwartz Writer 