k.d. lang on her "ingenue" tour
March 23, 2018 12:24 PM   Subscribe

A really good interview about her current tour and coping with middle age. Here's a video of the kickoff of this tour: Constant Craving

and here's my favorite of her with Roy Orbison: Crying
posted by MovableBookLady (24 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
Here's k.d. blowing the doors off a rendition of Hallelujah at the recent tribute to Leonard Cohen.

And here's a personal favorite of mine: Miss Chatelaine.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:15 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


That voice! I love her so much.

Also, I do not have time to go down a k.d. lang rabbit hole today! Well, maybe just a few more...
posted by Duffington at 1:16 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


The greatest female voice of my lifetime. No competition. Sorry, Bey.
posted by tzikeh at 1:55 PM on March 23, 2018 [7 favorites]


1. Is 56 is middle aged now? I thought when I turned 40 last year I was finally at middle age myself, but I guess not? If the goal posts keep moving I'm never going to get there.

2. Save Me is my favorite for listening to... that slinky guitar work at the start of it! But my favorite to sing will always be Miss Chatelaine.
posted by elsietheeel at 1:55 PM on March 23, 2018 [4 favorites]


She is perfection. Ingenue is perfection. So is Hymns of the 49th Parallel. Especially this song, which breaks me every time.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 2:11 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Awesome. I saw her in the Beacon Theater (NYC) supporting the "Sing it Loud" cd. Seeing her there again in a few short weeks! As singers ourselves, albeit in a radically different repertoire, Mrs. slkinsey and I have always been taken with her truly masterful command of vocal registration, which she uses to great interpretive effect.

We have always liked "Drag," her covers album, best. Especially this amazing cover of the "The Air that I Breathe."
posted by slkinsey at 2:20 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


She's part of so many fond memories of my twenties : in the very early nineties it felt like so many doors were opening, culturally. My fave of hers is "I'd Walk In the Snow Barefoot" from an MTV Unplugged compilation. So glad she's still very much around.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 3:44 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


If you've missed her work with Neko Case and Laura Veirs, then please go and fill that enormous hole in your life right now.
posted by pipeski at 3:56 PM on March 23, 2018 [10 favorites]


This reminded me that there was once a queer k.d. lang fanzine called "Consort Craving." (issues 1-3 from 1992-95 are held in the archive of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.)
posted by larrybob at 4:09 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Ms. Lang’s sexuality may never have been intertwined to her stardom, but she spoke about it to a writer for The Advocate in the summer of 1992, because at the time Queer Nation, an AIDS activist group, “was outing people right and left,” she said, “which was icky. It was like the PETA of sexuality.”

NY Times needs to hire some queer fact-checkers. Queer Nation may have been founded by ACT UP members but it was formed around queer activism, not AIDS activism.
posted by larrybob at 4:21 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


Wow "Constant Craving" really takes me back to my college years. I hadn't thought about that song for a while. I'll have to add it to the rotation.
posted by 4ster at 5:22 PM on March 23, 2018


also she has great hair.
posted by roger ackroyd at 5:35 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


The answer for 31-across in last Saturday’s NYT crossword was “CONSTANTCRAVING” ... blammo, 15 letters right across the middle of the grid. The clue was “1992 hit for k.d. lang”

That made me feel ... old. (And not just because there I was, doing the NYT crossword...)
posted by chavenet at 5:39 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Saw k.d. on her 49th Parallel tour. She was astonishing. That voice! And Hallelujah live was, well, basically everything I wanted it to be.
posted by hippybear at 6:27 PM on March 23, 2018


From the Red Hot + Blue album (compilation of artists singing Cole Porter songs to raise money for AIDS research)--my favorite cover from the album and one of my favorite pieces from Lang: So In Love (the visuals are striking, both in their dramatic purpose, and in retrospect as an illustration of how much we still didn't know about AIDS in 1990).
posted by tzikeh at 6:45 PM on March 23, 2018 [2 favorites]


I'm a big fan of Hymns of the 49th Parallel and Drag, but my favorite album of hers is still Absolute Torch and Twang. The closest I've come to hearing her live is when she was on SNL, and her rendition of "Pullin' Back the Reins" just blew me away--I couldn't quite believe that I was hearing what I was hearing. Instant fan.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:40 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


Man, meandering through k.d. lang-land on the 'net today brought up the Herb Ritts' pics for the Vanity Fair shoot he did of lang and Cindy Crawford. Do you guys remember the uproar?

Cover

Article photo
posted by tzikeh at 10:14 PM on March 23, 2018 [1 favorite]


A national treasure.
posted by Malingering Hector at 10:41 PM on March 23, 2018


I've seen her three times: once on the 1993 Constant Craving tour at the Fox in Atlanta, in 1987 at Center Stage in Atlanta and the first time on the closing night at 8BC in New York City in 1985. Each a very different show, each excellent. She was my non-ironic introduction to the world of Country and Western.

If she ever plays someplace other than the Atlanta Botanical Gardens or Chastain, I'll go see her again.
posted by donpardo at 5:58 AM on March 24, 2018


I agree with Tony Bennett.
posted by tommasz at 6:59 AM on March 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


I saw her in Akron last week. They did the entire Ingénue album, in order. She's a captivating performer and seems genuinely happy on stage.

About a month ago I saw Shawn Colvin do the entire album A Few Small Repairs, also in the original order. And Liz Phair is doing a tour performing the "Girly Sound" tapes. Seems to be a great year for anniversary tours.
posted by Surely This at 12:16 PM on March 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


I bought that magazine for the cover. I’d never seen anything like it in my whole damned life. There were only two lesbians, k.d.lang and Martina Navratilova, but everything was about to explode. I had Ingenue on tape and played it ragged on my Walkman. One of my absolute faves is from a tiny bit later though, this glorious, bent duet with Andy Bell at the 93 Brits. I’d love to have seen her live at the time, these days her style is a little too loungey, verging on Shatneresque in the clips I’ve seen and it’s not really my thing, regrettably. Or am I misjudging her, Surely This? It feels like there’s a lot of scooping notes going on as opposed to the clarity I kinda loved.
posted by Iteki at 6:21 AM on March 25, 2018


I’d love to have seen her live at the time, these days her style is a little too loungey,

Hey people who've seen her on her current Ingenue tour -- does it sound like it did 25 years ago?
posted by elsietheeel at 7:44 AM on March 25, 2018


Her voice has aged, of course, so she occasionally reaches for a note she used to hit spot-on. Still, I'd say that she still has remarkable vocal chops, and the musicality of her phrasing is clearly still there.

As to sounding a bit "loungy", it occurred to me that she could do a killer Vegas residency if she chose to. Not saying that she's morphed into Dean Martin or Wayne Newton (hardly!), but her vocalizing has a certain "relaxed" character to it. Her stage presence is warm and humorous.
posted by Surely This at 3:05 PM on March 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


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