KD LANG (nee Kathyn Dawn) OC AOE, born on this date. is a Canadian pop and country singer-songwriter and occasional actress whose professional name spelling is all lower case kd lang. Lang has won Juno Awards and Grammy Awards for her musical performances. Hits include the songs “Constant Craving” and “Miss Chatelaine”.
A mezzo-soprano, lang has contributed songs to movie soundtracks and has collaborated with musicians such as Roy Orbison, Tony Bennett, Elton John, The Killers, Anne Murray, Ann Wilson, and Jane Siberry. She performed at the closing ceremony of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, and at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”.
Lang has also been active as an animal rights, gay rights, and Tibetan human rights activist. She is a tantric practitioner of the old school of Tibetan Buddhism.
Lang was born in Edmonton, Alberta, the youngest child of Audrey Bebee and Adam Frederick Lang. She is of English, Irish, Scottish, German, Russian-Jewish, Icelandic, and Sioux ancestry. When lang was nine months old, her family moved to Consort, Alberta, where she grew up with two older sisters and one older brother in the Canadian prairies. Her father, a drugstore owner, left the family when she was twelve.
In 1986, lang signed a contract with an American record producer in Nashville, Tennessee, and received critical acclaim for her 1987 album, Angel with a Lariat, which was produced by Dave Edmunds.
Lang chose to use a lower-case name, inspired by the poet e. e. cummings.
Lang first earned international recognition in 1988 when she performed as “The Alberta Rose” at the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics. Canadian women’s magazine Chatelaine selected lang as its “Woman of the Year” in 1988.
Lang’s career received a huge boost when Roy Orbison chose her to record a duet of his standard, “Crying”, a collaboration that won them the Grammy Award for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals in 1989. The song was used in the Jon Cryer film Hiding Out released in 1987. Due to the success of the song, lang received the Entertainer of the Year award from the Canadian Country Music Association. Lang would win the same award for the next three years, in addition to two Female Vocalist of the Year awards in 1988 and 1989.
1988 marked the release of Shadowland, an album of torch country produced by Owen Bradley. In late 1988, Shadowland was named Album of the Year by the Canadian Country Music Association. That year she also performed “Turn Me Round” at the closing ceremonies of the XV Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, and sang background vocals with Jennifer Warnes and Bonnie Raitt for Orbison’s acclaimed television special, Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night.
The 1992 album Ingénue, a set of adult-oriented pop songs that showed comparatively little country influence, contained her most popular song, “Constant Craving”. That song brought her multi-million sales and much critical acclaim. Coming out as lesbian the same year saw several US country stations banning her music, and she faced a picket line outside the 1993 Grammy Awards ceremony where she would receive the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Another top ten single from the record was “Miss Chatelaine”. The salsa-inspired track was ironic; Chatelaine, a women’s magazine, once chose lang as its “Woman of the Year”, and the song’s video depicted lang in an exaggeratedly feminine manner, surrounded by bright pastel colours and a profusion of bubbles reminiscent of a performance on The Lawrence Welk Show.
She received a writing credit for the Rolling Stones 1997 song, “Anybody Seen My Baby?”, whose chorus sounds similar to “Constant Craving”. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards claimed to have never heard the song before and when they discovered the similarity prior to the song’s release, were flummoxed as to how the songs could be so similar. Jagger discovered his daughter listening to a recording of “Constant Craving” on her stereo and realized he had heard the song before many times but only subliminally. The two gave lang credit, along with her co-writer Ben Mink, to avoid any possible lawsuits. Afterwards, lang said she was “completely honoured and flattered” to receive the songwriting credit.
She contributed much of the music towards Gus Van Sant’s soundtrack of the film Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and also did a cover of “Skylark” for the 1997 film adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. She performed “Surrender” for the closing titles of the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies.
Lang, who came out as a lesbian in a June 1992 article of the LGBT news magazine The Advocate, has championed gay rights causes.
She has supported many causes over the years, including HIV/AIDS care and research. Her cover of Cole Porter’s “So in Love” (from the Broadway musical, Kiss Me, Kate), appears on the Red Hot + Blue compilation album and video from 1990 (a tribute to Cole Porter to benefit AIDS research and relief). Her 2010 greatest hits album, Recollection, also includes this cover of “So in Love”. Lang also recorded the song “Fado Hilário”, singing in Portuguese, for the 1999 Red Hot AIDS benefit album Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon, a traditional fado from Portugal.
She is a vegetarian. Her “Meat Stinks” campaign in the 1990s created much controversy, particularly in her hometown, in the middle of Alberta’s cattle ranching industry—she was banned from more than 30 Alberta radio stations. A sign in Consort, Alberta, stating “Home of k.d. lang” was burned to the ground. Alberta’s agriculture minister at the time said it was “extremely unfortunate that she has decided to side with the animal rightists. There’s a certain feeling of betrayal – we have supported k.d. fairly well in Alberta”. More than a dozen radio stations in the U.S. throughout Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Montana and Nebraska also boycotted playing her records due to her “Meat Stinks” campaign.
Lang appeared on the cover of the August 1993 issue of Vanity Fair photographed by Herb Ritts. The cover featured lang in a barber chair while model Cindy Crawford appeared to shave her face with a straight razor, which lang would later say was inspired by the French film Le mari de la coiffeuse. The issue contained a detailed article about lang which observed that she had thought that she would be ostracized by the country music industry when she came out as a lesbian. However, they were accepting, and her records continued to sell, but when she appeared in an ad for PETA, they were less impressed, owing to the relationship between country music and cattle ranching.
In 2019, lang said in an interview that she considers herself semi-retired and may not be writing and recording new songs in the future. “I’m not feeling any particular urge to make music right now. The muse is eluding me. I am completely at peace with the fact that I may be done.”