To be the poster girl for anything (in this case, gay, vegetarian torch singing) is at best a responsibility, at worst a liability. Fans are increasingly proprietorial, even dictatorial, in this online age, and apt to make it clear how they feel their idol should respond or behave in any given circumstance.
So when kd lang told me last year (playfully) of her imagined retirement plans, some feathers were ruffled. “When I’m old I’m going to drink and smoke a lot of pot,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll eat meat. I may even sleep with a man. When my working years are over, I’d like to go a little crazy.” On these remarks’ publication in this magazine, fan-site forums began to ferment.
For some followers, it was the possibility that their idol might turn carnivore that caused consternation. For others, it was that she might go un-gay. Those really determined to be upset duly were, and on both counts. Today, at her Los Angeles home, lang shrugs and sighs. “I don’t want to offend anyone, but you can only ever be responsible for yourself.”
And that check list? Alcohol is neither here nor there, it seems. “And OK, I smoke pot already, so that isn’t either.” Meat? “Actually [and more of this later], I have eaten meat, in the context of Buddhist ceremonies.” Which just leaves the hetero sex? “It would have been like the meat-eating thing. I had such an aversion and aversion is wrong. I’d have been, ‘I don’t want to, but what does it actually matter?’ ”Lang and I have been meeting on and off for 20 years now. I have seen her evolve from left-of-centre industry newcomer (a little wary but still self-confident, and dressed in cowgirl clothes) into today’s mellow, nothing-to-prove, denim and plaid-clad elder stateswoman.
The world, too, has moved on since she came out to it all that time ago. A declaration of lesbianism is no longer the kiss goodbye to mainstream entertainment success. When your own fact of life is routinely hijacked for fashion and profit by others, you know you’ve helped change the prevailing culture.
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Happily, the once self-described “big-boned gal” from Consort, Alberta, has herself benefited from changes that have taken place in the interim. No matter that the music she makes is not the stuff of daytime radio. Thanks to downloads, lang is assured of a paying audience for as long as she cares to sing publicly.
The rewards of this are evident by the location in which we meet today. Her house at the top of Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills is low-key and elegant (the cabin-like structure sits on a wide, wooded site) yet is still a significant piece of real estate. It has true LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) credentials as well: the closeted Rock Hudson was a previous owner and is said to have used it for trysts with fellow actor Tab Hunter.
Lang shares it with Jamie Price, her partner of almost ten years. “Unbelievable. Both of us are so busy, neither expected it to last so long,” she admits of a relationship that began, and by her own assessment continues, thanks to their shared belief in an esoteric strain of Buddhism. “Our faith has been vital to it. The way we communicate in difficult situations, for example. Rather than get into a ‘Your point of view versus mine’ thing, we avoid unproductive conflict and work things through together.” It can be no walk in the park to be the partner of a public figure. Is Price – a full-time volunteer for various Buddhist youth programmes – a victim of wind-beneath-my-wings syndrome? “Oh, I don’t think we ever have to worry about her being the wallflower trembling in the great kd lang’s shadow,” comes the reply.
Lang has been frank in the past not just about her relative promiscuity during the first flush of her success, but about a precocious teenage sexuality. Now, clearly, it amuses her that metropolitan eyebrows should raise at the thought of a town as small and remote as Consort (population around 750) being some latter-day Peyton Place, a hotbed of libidinous intrigue. “Think what it must be like up in Anchorage,” lang smiles as her two elderly dogs amble around her feet. “Just consider the long winters, the fact that you’re forced by nature to stay indoors... In the sense of such activities, I’d imagine Consort is no different to small towns anywhere.”
The early relationship between lang and her late, store-owner father had been close and sporty, almost father-and-son like (she has two sisters and a brother). But when she was 12, he abandoned the family without explanation and skipped town with the woman next door, with whom he’d been having a long-running affair. There was next to no contact between father and daughter from that point on, but his very absence seems to have proved formative in terms of lang’s role in subsequent relationships.
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For example, experience has taught her that she is more relaxed when working in a predominantly male environment. “I find I always want to take care of other women. It’s just in my gay nature, probably because of how I took over all that guy stuff for my mom [a schoolteacher, now retired] when my dad left – clearing snow, putting out the trash. Maybe because of that I really like being with a bunch of boys. It’s that easy camaraderie. Women can achieve it, too, but generally I’ve found the vibe with them to be different.”
Not that in her domestic life now her role involves only such “guy stuff”. “It’s funny, because although she’s extraordinarily, beautifully feminine, Jamie’s such a bachelor. She’s a dude. So I do all – well, a lot of – the housework and laundry. I’ve always been that way. I just really like and enjoy it. I mean, I’m someone who tidies the bathroom on planes.”
If this nurturing, supportive side of lang seems at odds with her image, it only goes to show how two-dimensional images can be. “I think fans need to know and accept that I’m complex, I contradict myself and I like to change,” she says. A couple of quick fact checks then. Marriage? “I understand and respect why that particular commitment is important to some people, but it isn’t to Jamie and me.” And parenthood, biological or adoptive? “I haven’t a maternal bone in my body.”
It is the couple’s spiritual belief that shapes their priorities: “I see my own career as my personal offering, but the work Jamie does volunteering full-time is so far beyond anything I achieve.” And it may be this aspect of the 49-year-old’s mellow middle age that most challenges her fanbase. Not because they begrudge her finding personal happiness or are suspicious of religious beliefs; rather, because it’s nowhere near as out-there and, well, as sexy as the old, motorbike-riding kd.
What a burden, though, to have to live your life as others would have you do. Which may be why lang now decides to reveal that she, the high priestess of veggie gayness, has eaten meat – and because a man (her late Buddhist teacher, Lama Chodak Gyatso Rinpoche) told her to.
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“OK, we were doing this ceremony that involved partaking of the blessings, there was meat there and he said, ‘I want you to eat some.’ It had been 21 years and there’s a certain amount of ego and pride involved in that achievement, so I asked if he was sure. ‘Yes.’ Well, I was bawling, and that was one of the reasons he wanted me to do it. In the course of chewing on the flesh of this chicken I suddenly went, ‘OK, I get what this is teaching me. I’m eating my own flesh. I’m eating my mother. The bird. Nothing. I am eating nothing. It does not exist.’ These are the existential thoughts you have as a Buddhist. It was a really hard experience for me, but it was completely liberating, too. I stopped being a militant freak about other people eating meat. I am still a vegetarian but I want that to be my offering of thanks for everything I have.”
Back in the day, lang’s militant stance was a major issue in Consort, which lies in the heart of cattle-ranching country. Her support for an animal rights campaign (“Meat Stinks”) caused an angry, insult-daubing reaction in her home town. How is this relationship now? “Actually, they’ve been in contact recently, wanting to put up a sign saying it’s the home of kd lang and to do some merchandising.” About which she feels? “Why not? I don’t care. Well, I kind of do, but mainly I don’t. Whatever.”
So possibly, in time, a visitor centre rich in lang memorabilia with, at the exit, a gift shop offering kd mugs, sweatshirts and more? She laughs. “As long as there’s a fetching wax figure of me, I’ll sanction it.”
At which point, lang rises from the table in search of her mobile phone. “Want to see my mom?” she asks, before showing me an image of a smiling, confident-looking, bespectacled 88-year-old. “She sold the family home a while back and moved to a retirement community in Edmonton, since when she’s just kept going on trips. Egypt, Israel, China... She’s awesome and my role model.”
On this scant evidence, lang doesn’t resemble her mother physically. And of her own, long-established public image she says, “I’m not self-conscious about my appearance, and obviously I’ve been working the butch look for a long time now. At events like last night’s [we meet the day after the Grammy Awards] it can be challenging coming up with clothes that look right. It’s not like there’s an androgyny store where you can just buy off the shelf.”
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Did people tell her she looked great last night? “No one ever tells me I look great. Luckily, I’ve been given a very confident, headstrong personality which has served me well. Thank God I can sing pretty good, because it balances out the whole physical strangeness of me and cuts me some slack.
“It may look like I don’t care about style, but actually, it takes a lot of deliberation to come up with something that’s simple yet androgynous. Armani is great for me for formal occasions, but for our forthcoming tour, the boys and I are going for a modern take on country, an updated version of what I was wearing at the start of my career.”
The dates are to promote the swooning, slightly otherwordly Sing It Loud. Together with her new musical best buddy, Joe Pisapia, lang wrote and recorded most of the album in Nashville, whose musical community viewed her askance when she was just starting out in her Patsy Cline tribute mode. Going back, she found much had changed. “Now it’s like there’s a pocket of Austin [the liberal Texan city] there, too. All these amazing, hipster musicians have moved in, like Jack White, Ben Folds and Gillian Welch. I used to be a freak by its standards, but this time I felt right at home.”
So there weren’t demonstrators outside her hotel with “Go home, veggie dyke” placards? “No, which I was kind of surprised about.” And maybe a little disappointed? She grins. “Yeah, to be honest, there probably was a little part of me that did feel that way.”
At this point, Pisapia arrives at the house, the two positively beaming to be back in each other’s company. “You know another reason why I love this guy so much?” lang asks. “He’s straight but loves to hoover. Every day in the studio before we started work, I’d be washing up coffee cups and he’d be vacuuming. It was like a ritual. I loved it.”
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We head to an industrial unit in north Hollywood where lang and her new, six-man band, the Siss Boom Bang (a friend’s description of the sound they make crashing into the new album’s opening track), are rehearsing for the tour. Their sound is considerable in this enclosed space, and that’s before she comes to sprawl alongside me on a sofa, an arm thrown across my shoulders. In that position, she sings Constant Craving and Hallelujah, the Leonard Cohen song she performed before a TV audience of millions at the opening of last year’s Winter Olympics. “Your own private show,” she says, having delivered its testing final note, her head tilted back to horizontal, the microphone held high above her head.
She is due elsewhere now and smiles a little ruefully when, as we say our goodbyes, I remark she seems more contented than at any time since I have known her. “Yes, although impermanence is backing up its big, ugly U-Haul at me in a major way. My beloved partner Sailor [the elder of her two dogs] is 16 and likely to pass away this year, probably when I’m away on the road. And you know how it is with an elderly mom... any season, any day.
“But again, probably the greatest gift my teacher gave me was the tools for dealing with that impermanence. I accept that it’s an inevitability and, in a way, beautiful and exciting, too. I’m at that age where our parents are dying and, if you’re not getting cancer yourself, then your friends are. I’m approaching that really big turnstile now and am bracing myself for the change that’s going to come.” Saying which she hugs me briefly and produces the keys to her Prius – the motorbike, sadly, is in for repair.
Sing It Loud is released by Nonesuch on April 18