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Reintarnation!

Sunday, July 02, 2006

kd lang releases a 20-track retrospective of her early career. By Brian Wise

First it has to be said that kd lang’s new compilation album is a contender for album title of the year: Reintarnation. Coined by a Washington Post reader in their annual competition to find new definitions it means ‘coming back to life as a hillbilly.’ <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>
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“I can’t take credit for that,” laughs kd when I catch up with her to talk about the album.<o:p></o:p>
 “I think it’s a great title.”<o:p></o:p>
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Spanning the years 1984-1993, the single disc collection gathers twenty songs from lang's early years, compiled by lang and her long-time collaborator Ben Mink. <o:p></o:p>
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It is a very different kd lang we hear on these selections than her more recent sophisticated sound. The songs on this retrospective are taken from A Truly Western Experience, Angel With A Lariat (produced by Dave Edmunds), Shadowland (produced by Owen Bradley), Absolute Torch And Twang and Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. There is also the previously unreleased ‘Changed My Mind,’ the second ever song written by lang and Mink. <o:p></o:p>
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Coming so soon after her album of covers Hymns of The 49th Parallel it is a salient reminder of lang’s so-called ‘cowpunk’ days and a stark contrast with her current image.<o:p></o:p>
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“I was excited about it,” says lang, “because I like the juxtaposition it illuminates for people in comparison to who I am now - or sheds some light on who I was then, as opposed to who I am now.”<o:p></o:p>
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“I’m not one of these people that are embarrassed,” she replies when I ask how she feels about the songs twenty years on, “actually I’m kind of proud and it was a fun moment in my life.”<o:p></o:p>
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“So I guess enough time has passed that I don’t suffer from embarrassment,” she laughs. “I’m kind of proud and happy with it, I still find it quite fun.”<o:p></o:p>
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Apart from the pithy album title, many of the songs on Reintarnation are proof of lang’s sense of humour – something that might not be so apparent on her recent recordings. <o:p></o:p>
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“I think that’s probably my own doing,” she says when I suggest that people see her as a ‘serious’ artist. “I think because I really, at some point after the country career, I really wanted to just focus on singing and really let all that other stuff go. I think people do see me as a serious singer and forget about the other part of me.”<o:p></o:p>
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While lang talks about being a country singer I mention that I am not sure not sure what part of the country music scene she might have fitted into two decades ago. <o:p></o:p>
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“You and me both and probably everyone else,” she laughs, “I was influenced by people like, obviously Patsy Cline, but June Carter Cash and Minnie Pearl - and people who really incorporated humour into what they were doing. I was really into that whole scene.  From that point of view, I think people were a little off-put. In <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Nashville</st1:place></st1:City> they didn’t know if I was making fun of them, they didn’t know if I was serious about the music or if I was one-upping them.”<o:p></o:p>
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I get an emphatic ‘No’ when I ask lang if she thinks she would have been embraced by the alt.country fraternity. <o:p></o:p>
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“I didn’t listen to country in my childhood at all. I hated it. I thought it was square and kitsch and corny that everyone else thinks of it. But I really came to country when I heard Patsy Cline really.  My interest in it may have started earlier than that, I guess, with Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons. Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ was actually one song that made me start thinking about country.  But it really sort of solidified for me when I heard Patsy Cline.  I’d heard humour and anxiety and pain and passion and all these great things, and honesty, in Patsy’s voice. I guess I realised that country music was a real fundamental essential kind of American music, and like blues, really a white blues…that it was a very, very important part in music history.”<o:p></o:p>
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One of the very first country songs that lang wrote, ‘Pine & Stew’, appears here. Ostensibly an ode about unrequited love it is also an anti-nuke song as she sings ‘you think I’m mentally anguished over you, does the fact that we may die urge you to pine and stew?’<o:p></o:p>
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“It was very important to me to deal with subject matter that in country music, wouldn’t necessarily be a theme,” explains lang. “I found it really exciting to talk about things in a really traditional style but be talking about things that were really sort of from a liberal point of view.  That was one of the things that really excited me about country music. I think there was a lot of focus on nuclear energy at that time, and it was basically a statement about the social concern of nuclear energy and accidents and just the whole nuclear prospect.”<o:p></o:p>
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Lang admits that the Shadowland album, produced by the legendary Owen Bradley (who worked with Patsy Cline) was a huge turning point in her career. <o:p></o:p>
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“When I had the chance to work with Owen Bradley, who produced all the Patsy Kline records, it was almost like a fruition or reaching a destination,” says lang. “I had accomplished what I was interested in, which was studying this singer as much as possible, and working with Owen Bradley was sort of as far as I could go with it. And then Torch And Twang came along because we had already started writing it before I made Shadowland. So it was the end of the country thing. And then after that, that was when I made the big shift publicly.”<o:p></o:p>
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Reintarnation is out now on Rhino/Sire through WEA.<o:p></o:p>

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