k.d. lang revisits her early cowpunk with a refreshing retrospective. Dust off your sequins, little doggies!

By John Polly

Here's a journalist's tip for you: A good way to break the ice with k.d. lang when you're going to interview her is to tell her that you listened to her new record all weekend while you were cleaning house. For some reason, if you're calling up the Grammy-winning world-renowned chanteuse/cowgirl/ vegetarian pop star (who just happens to be one of the most famous lesbians on the planet) to ask her questions about her new album, Reintarnation, and this innocuous bit of information gets relayed, she laughs and becomes super-relaxed and comments affably: "I bet you were cleaning really fast!"

And then you'll both crack up because she's right. Need to charge your engine and get zipping around the house with a broom or Swiffer or Dirt Devil (or any other energetic activity)? Then simply pop Reintarnation into your preferred music-playing device. That's because the 20-song collection is a rollicking, rhythmic retrospective of the first decade of k.d. lang's work. That means it's an imaginative, fresh and whip-smart soundtrack, spanning much of the 1980s and early '90s, which charges right out of the chute bucking and snapping and cranking with a festive cowpunk beat. In fact, much of the early part of lang's career -- before she grew into the seasoned pop star with the grown-up, immaculately smooth voice that propelled her landmark album Ingenue to zillion-selling status, and before she took it further with sophisticated and sunny pop albums like All You Can Eat and Invincible Summer or collaborated and crooned with Tony Bennett on worldwide tours, or cultivated a Canadian songbook with the acclaimed release, Hymns of the 49th Parallel -- was spent as a country singer who charmed the socks off of the Nashville establishment with her clever reinvention of the musical genre which held such greats as Patsy Cline, Roy Acuff, Brenda Lee, Minnie Pearl and Loretta Lynn as its icons.

Yep, lang first rose to prominence as a fiery, fun-loving cowgirl, known as much for her almost cartoonishly sequined Western apparel (yes, you can almost call it cowgirl drag) and exuberant onstage energy, as for her singular grasp of how to pay tribute to the sass and smarts of country music, while also revelling reverently in it's hokier elements. (Song titles such as "Big Boned Girl," "Got the Bull By the Horns," "Hanky Panky," "Friday Dance Promenade" and "Cowgirl Pride" testify to the spunk that infused much of lang's honky-tonkin' oeuvre.) And somehow, as much fun as lang had recording her fun-spirited country tunes, instead of sounding like send-ups, her music served as tributes to a genre she had grown to love.

Of course, no one was more surprised than lang when she found herself ascending the ranks of country-music stardom. "Before I officially became a musician, I was not really listening to country " admits lang, of her early years in Canada. "Back then I wasn't interested in country; I was doing performance art. I was working with a group of artists who did art installations with found art and social commentary and this kind of industrial punk music, with tape loops and breaking glass and shit like that." She laughs recalling that time: "But soon I started feeling anxious; I was looking for something with more structure and something more to hit my head against. For my 21st birthday, I'd been given two Patsy Cline records, and Coal Miner's Daughter had been out earlier, and there was this weird affinity growing toward country music in the gay scene. My brother and sisters were really into it. [Yes, both lang's brother and one of her sisters are gay, too. "My poor mother," lang laughs as she confirms this fact.]

For a Canadian girl who grew up in a rural ranching and farming community of Consort, Alberta (pop. 650), the lifestyle celebrated in country music was one which was already very familiar. "I knew the essence of that mindset and that world," explains lang. "I may have been coming at it from a completely different perspective, but at the same time, as a singer I found that the genre gave me something really challenging, and it gave the vocalist a lot of room. And conceptually, there was a lot of room to play with the more traditional ways of thinking. Plus, it was a lot of fun in terms of fashion," lang recalls warmly. "I had fun getting really creative with the fashion, playing with a look in which I could incorporate my really boyish demeanor and haircut and attitude, while at the same time wearing these crazy dresses. It was all a lot of fodder for my creative energy."

But as much fun as she had tailoring her hyper-Nashville persona, lang never veered into parody. "It was like a kind of performance art for me," she notes. "But the thing was I had a real, true love and respect for the artists I chose to follow; and I ended up being a student of those icons, like Patsy and Loretta. There was humor in it, but that had also been incorporated by people like Minnie Pearl and Cousin Joe and String Bean before. And I loved that self-effacing humor; June Carter Cash was another good example. I just kind of combined all of those things."

Of course, she had some very skilled help along the way, as her major label debut, 1987's hit, Angel with a Lariat, was produced by roots-rock icon Dave Edmunds. On its follow-up, Shadowland, lang teamed with the iconic Owen Bradley, the man who'd produced her forbears (Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Brenda Lee). Then came 1989's Absolute Torch and Twang, which yielded lang more country hits and her first Grammy for best female country vocalist.

Then, as anyone who was around in the early 1990s recalls, lang achieved even greater fame, way beyond Nashville, when she came out as a lesbian in a cover story in The Advocate. Before even she could fathom it, she was on the cover of Vanity Fair and being named as "One of 1992's Most Important People of the Year" by Barbara Walters. "I had always thought I was pretty out," chuckles lang. "From the start I was singing songs like 'Bop-a-lina' and 'Polly Ann,' songs that seemed obviously gay to me... So it didn't really occur to me to come out officially. But then came AIDS, and around the time of Ingenue the group Queer Nation was doing its thing, and it was becoming a very political issue to be out. So I just thought, 'Well, I'll just come out. It's not like it's a big jump.'"

So jump she did. And she's been world-famous ever since. (Of course it helped that subsequently, Ingenue, and its mega-selling single "Constant Craving" nabbed her a Grammy for best female pop vocal performance around the same time.)

Still, after the subsequent stylistic turns her career has taken, it's a testament to the skillfull execution that went into her early music that the torch and twang of Reintarnation doesn't sound at all dated. These timeless country nuggets could have been recorded last week, rather than up to 20 years ago.

"That's probably because the essence of country music hasn't changed all that much," explains lang modestly, about revisiting her earliest work with producer Ben Mink. "When we took these songs and remixed them, we basically just cleaned them up and made them as organic as possible. We took a lot of the reverb off, which had been popular back then, and made them kind of bare bones, which sounds really strong, I think." It doesn't hurt that lang's full-throated performances easily sustain years later, also. "I think the performances were pretty pure," she admits. "Even if we didn't really know what we were doing back then, it all stands up surprisingly well."

Ultimately, even lang herself is pleased with the results of mining these early efforts to create the Reintarnation release. And while she's not planning a retro-fueled tour to showcase these songs again, she does have plans to dust off those spangled dresses at least once -- maybe. "I think we may do a show at the gay rodeo in Reno in November," she laughs. "I might have to bust out some of the old gear for that."

For the most part, the trip down memory lane that is Reintarnation has been fun for lang, as it will be for a fan. "It was something of a sense memory," says lang of the experience of hearing and revisiting this music. "All of a sudden all of these pictures and places and styles of dress came flooding through. It was like looking at a yearbook. I remembered all of the passion and the energy that I had to take on the world and to really fuck country music up. The only thing that's the same," cracks lang "is my hair. I mean, maybe it's a little better ... seeing the haircuts. That's been the only scary part."