To my mind at least, K.D Lang will always be best remembered, not for that heaving crock of melodrama that was ‘Constant Craving’ but as that testy lesbian bint of whom Madonna once declared ‘Elvis is alive….and she’s beautiful’ – which is probably why Kathryn Dawn Lang has decided to set the record straight with ‘Reintarnation’ – a roots-oriented package that focuses on the early years of Lang’s career when the little ‘cowpunk’ gal with the mighty Patsy Cline voice and the shock of spiky hair poked the hide of the Nashville elite with her gentle transgressions and misdemeanours, and who was embraced by the industry mainstream about as kindly as a wild cayote. Not that she’s ever made embracing easy, prowling from one genre to another, trying on different faces, different set-ups, rarely realising the full potential of her broad, swelling tonsils and rarely still, seeming to care. Most of us know Lang from 1992 ‘s hugely ubiquitous, ‘Ingenue’ album when the gritty Nashville leanings got dropped in favour of stalker sensitive torch songs in the grip of croonworthy adult schmaltz; an approach that was dumped immediately when a casual familiarity with dance and electronica saw Lang release the brash and ultra-cynical ‘All You Can Eat’ in 1995. Lang was guilty of a stylistic promiscuity that made it hard for any fanbase, however loyal, to continue its relationship with her. Not that loyalty was ever an issue. Just one look at her history accounts for that. Raised in Consort, Alberta, a town with one gas station and one barbershop, brought up and later spurned by a father who was having an affair with the next-door neighbour, dashing from one athletics tournament to another, rejected by Nashville, misrepresented as a poster-girl for lesbian chic by her friends as well as the media, tossed from one major label to another and largely misunderstood. For a girl just paying tribute her heroine Patsy Cline, it’s been a bumpy ride to say the least and fraught with unnecessary complications. Lang was like a big, old beautiful Cadillac with a mighty engine, but with a recurring, pesky oil leak. And what better way to deal with a faulty engine than to strip it down, lay back on the concrete and have a good look at your early transmissions.
So here we are all the way back in1983 when Lang independently releases her first single, ‘Friday Dance Promenade’ with just 500 copies pressed for distribution at concerts and as keen as a cowhand to please with covers as tickly and frolicsome as ‘Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes’. There’s also a good dose of remastered and remixed material from the album that broke Lang in Canada, the Dave Edmunds produced, ‘Angel With A Lariat’ in 1987, which have been pared down and sonically ‘reimagined’ to reduce the injury caused by Edmund’s largely insensitive rockabilly trimmings.
In addition to a couple of tunes leaked from Lang’s 1984 debut, ‘Truly Western Experience’ (‘Hanky Panky’, ‘Pine and Stew’), ‘Reintarnation’ boasts a bucketload of tracks from the Grammy award-winning, ‘Absolute Torch and Twang’ (1987) plus the previously unreleased, ‘Changed My Mind’, a track written around the same time as ‘Absolute Torch..’ with long time collaborator, Ben Mink.
Now living in LA with a Harley Davidson in the driveway, and exploring the surrounding nature reserves from her 1939 cabin-style hideaway, Lang seems happy to release lo-key, lo-fi material like’ Hymns of the 49th Parallel’, slowing disentangling her roots and thinning out the damaged growth and naturally, ‘Reintarnation’ (meaning re-born as a hillbilly) comes somewhere off the back of all that.
It’s often the case that we think we know a person when we don’t, and most folks are likely to ignore the release based squarely on the public recognition as Lang as Gay Icon and minor curiosity in the cult of a major celebrity, but it’s worthy of our attention, if only because its likely to be your only opportunity to decide one way of the other for sure.
It’s not Johnny Cash by any means, but its moody and lilting and humming with sexual dissidence.