Interview with kd lang | The Guardian

Last time we looked, kd lang was struggling with the grim reality of being the world's foremost lesbian icon. Now she's settled down with a nice girl, a home improvement manual and a new album of happy pop. What went right? She talks to Eddi Fiegel

And with that fulfilment has come a looser, more relaxed approach. Wearing big, roomy, faded jeans, floppy jumper and very little make-up, she exudes a sense of mellowness which is at odds with the macho flirtatiousness of her previous incarnations. This, after all, is the woman who, soon after coming out, celebrated the success of her million-selling 1992 album Ingénue by appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair in full male drag while being shaved by a scantily clad Cindy Crawford.

Best known for her hits Constant Craving and her spine-chilling duet with the late Roy Orbison on his own Crying, lang seemed hardly likely to make an album celebrating happiness in love. But with her new album Invincible Summer, that is exactly what she has done. After turning country music on its Cuban heels in the mid-80s with her "new country" or "cowpunk" albums - Truly Western Experience, Shadowland and Absolute Torch and Twang - she would also not have been expected to make a mainstream pop/rock album. But that is what she has done.

Why now? "For some reason I just had an adversity to pop," lang says. "I just got to this point where I went, 'You know what? I love pop music. Who are you kidding? You know you like it as a listener, so why can't you do it as a singer?' And then I just fell in love with people again. I fell in love with life and I accepted the fact that I liked pop music. So I thought, 'Make a pop record because you're just making it for people who have normal jobs, and they're just like you - a normal person. Why can't you make a normal sounding record?' So I did."

Her new contentment is largely due to her relationship with 28-year-old Leisha Hailey - lead singer with the all-female group the Murmurs - with whom she has set up home in California. Before meeting Hailey four years ago, lang had run through a series of intense but short-lived liaisons, devoting her time and energy to the career merry-go-round of album-tour-album. Then, just as she had decided to slow down, she met Hailey. The attraction caught her by surprise: she had generally been attracted to "glamorous model types", yet Hailey was an alternative musician with an entirely different character.

The start of the relationship ushered in a new lifestyle for lang. Having decided to spend time rediscovering "normal life", she bought and renovated a house in California and has spent the last few years decorating, cooking and walking her dog on the beach. But she also found time to write a new album's worth of material and the resulting songs celebrate the various stages of romantic love, from the initial fascination of the tentative, languorous Dusty Springfield-style ballad Suddenly ("My only distraction is this attraction / That I'm dying to explore") to the free-wheeling, string-fuelled giddiness of Summer Fling and the awestruck Beatles-tinged rapture of When We Collide ("When we collide like heaven has exploded inside").

For every song written about loving bliss, there are probably another 100 detailing unrequited love, failed romance, jealousy and obsession - which is why Invincible Summer comes as a suprise. "Happiness is a tough thing to contain in a piece of art," says lang. "There's much more fodder for art in the dark side, I think, just because happiness is a tough thing to make new. Happiness has gotten a really bad reputation and I think it's overlooked as corny or shallow or trite, but I don't know why it's gotten such a bad rap. I think it's just as legitimate if it has integrity." To embrace the upper echelons of happiness, do you need to have viewed life from the other extreme? "Yeah, that's true," she says. "I was certainly a bastion of the melancholy and the struggle of love, and I really don't think I could have made this album without understanding the dark and the loneliness."

That "dark" surfaced on lang's earlier albums, in songs such as Luck In My Eyes from Absolute Torch and Twang ("I can hear a howling wind / that sweeps away / the pain that's been") and Outside Myself from Ingénue ("A thin ice / Covers my soul/ My body's frozen and my heart is cold").

Looking at lang's life over the past decade, it's easy to see what may have prompted these feelings. Her success came with a price. For years, she was plagued by rumours about her sexual orientation, and when she finally succumbed to the pressure and told Rolling Stone magazine what it wanted to hear, she was stunned by the reaction. Not only were many of her fans horrified, the country music establishment in Nashville, which had earlier embraced her, embarked on a barrage of endless criticism and virtually cast her out. There was nothing straightforward about her childhood, either. She was raised in the prairie town of Consort in Alberta, Canada (population 650). Although at first it is the Californian influence which is most evident - with much talk of "emotional journeys", "reclarifying my definition towards my music" and "being in a positive space" - as she becomes more candid, her language is instead peppered with allusions to rivers, trees and the elements.

Her father left the family home when she was 11, and she admits that this loss still informs most of what she does. It is something lang has spent time analysing, talking about and learning to deal with. "I think the depth of your understanding is as deep as it's been cut. It's like a riverbed - the river's as deep as the land has been cut, so of course my understanding of pain is as deep as its strength. That will never go away."

The lang household was strongly Protestant and the young Kathy Dawn was sent to Sunday school every week "until I was old enough to say no". Describing herself as "an active pantheist", lang sees her voice as God-given. She says that, although she may have been interested in becoming a cinematographer or an Olympic volleyball player, there was never any question of what she was: a singer, as far back as she can remember. "Everyone has a gift," she says. "I'm just a specific type of tree that provides a specific type of fruit. That's what I do."

Her gift, she says, is not hers to own. "It's kind of like water or air - like some thing that flows through me. I certainly have to provide the vessel - have to keep clean and focused and available. I've always felt this divine existence, like I've always had an idea of my own spirituality, even when I was young and I was fighting the ideas of the church and Christianity because I always felt this broader understanding of God."

Having decided to make pop music, lang wanted to make an album which combined the breezy easy-listening California pop of the Mamas and the Papas with the kind of 70s synth sounds used on Air's Moon Safari. "I always felt like there was a romance to California, but I fought it for a long time because I'm Canadian and Hollywood's got this negative, artificial side to it. But finally I found my peace with the culture, and it really is an astonishingly beautiful place. Once you get past the silicone, it's full of artists and there are real people there, and beaches and hills and desert and sunshine. So, in the end, this album became a complete love letter to California."

But as much as wanting the album to be about California, lang also wanted a British pop sound, and to this end - at Madonna's recommendation - hired former William Orbit keyboard player and collaborator Damian LeGassick as producer.

"I'm not trying to be patronising," she says, "but there is something about the British pop sensibility. Certainly in the structure of a lot of pop music - Radiohead and the Beatles and David Gray. There's just an understanding of this classic melody approach that happens in pop music here in Britain that I really love. It's this beautiful balance that the British have... You know that string line in Invincible Summer?" She sings me the dizzying, cartwheeling string line LeGassick wrote for the song. "It's like... it's cheeky, but at the same time it's classic, it's perfect. That's why I was so fixated on getting a British producer."

Alongside the album's breezy mood, it is the very Britishness of the sound that is the album's other most striking feature. On several tracks, particularly Consequences of Falling, it is also almost impossible not to notice similarities between lang's voice and Dusty Springfield's, a connection heightened by the expansively string-fuelled retro-style production. "Dusty did influence this record," lang says. "When Dusty died and that Decca compilation came out, hearing her arrangements - the Bacharach stuff and the timbre of her voice - definitely influenced this record." Interesting that over 30 years since they were made, the pop records of a British singer inspired by American soul should in turn inspire a Canadian singer whose musical roots lie in country.

In these days of trillion-selling power-belters, when the Mariahs, Whitneys and Celines have boiled down universal emotions to the lowest common denominator and sent them back vacuum-packed and cellophane-wrapped, Invincible Summer proves that it is still possible to make a commercial, accessible record which contains laughter, joy and vulnerability.

There will inevitably be those who will disagree, who will criticise her for continuing in the more commercial direction which Ingénue began, but lang is, at least for the time being, content to take a new, more relaxed approach to her music - and to her life.

"Being happy in a relationship means you don't care so much about things. You don't care so much about your clothes, about your body." She smiles. "Because you're defined and grounded on the inside, the rest is easier. You're anchored. And it's beautiful."

• kd lang's single Consequences of Falling is out on October 23.

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