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Reflecting on her 25 years in music as she compiled her first greatest-hits collection, KD Lang confesses she had plenty of reason to cringe. But it wasn’t the earnest, heartfelt lyrics or even her lurid stage outfits that sent the blood rushing to the Canadian singer’s cheeks. It was her hair.
“You know, when someone looks back on their life, it’s usually the hair that’s the fun part,” she chuckles. “But for me, the most embarrassing and astonishing aspect is I think I still have the same haircut.”
So why doesn’t she change it? “oh, I don’t think a perm would suit me,” quips KD.
Indeed, while most stars seem to change their hairstyles as often as their underpants, even the earliest pictures of KD (short for Kathleen Dawn) as she was first starting out as a singer in a Patsy Cline tribute band show her trademark cropped do.
“I was pretty cocky and very focused back then,” the 48-year-old recalls. “I had blinders on. I was hell-bent on success and to be quite honest, I always knew I was going to make it in the music industry – aside from a brief while where I wanted to be a phys-ed teacher.”
KD’s big break came when she toured as a back-up singer with Roy orbison and was chosen to record a duet of his classic tune Crying. In 1992, she shot to international stardom with her album Ingenue, which sold millions of copies and contained her Grammy-winning hit Constant Craving.
That year, the singer also publicly declared she was a lesbian, which sent her profile through the roof. KD appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair with Cindy Crawford, was romantically linked to Madonna and Martina Navratilova, and got invited to all the hippest showbiz parties. But coming out was hardly a commercial decision.
“It was an opportunity to take my own destiny, announcing my orientation in a responsible and elegant way,” insists KD, who claims she knew she was gay at age five, when she fell for her swimming instructor. “The Aids crisis was at its height and there was a lot of homophobia, around so I also wanted to help dispel the misconceptions about the gay and lesbian community.”
It was the most successful period of KD’s career, but the singer herself describes this time in her life as like a drug trip or sugar high. She explains, “I was propelled into this incredible, unrealistic dream where everyone was telling me, ‘You’re great and you’re beautiful!’
“It’s like I was on a treadmill, working really hard and being inundated with all these false, superficial accolades. I was drunk off the hype and I even started believing it. But it was only temporary. Ultimately, nothing can prepare you for the comedown.”
Suffering from burnout, KD retired from the celebrity circus and recorded the album All You Can Eat, which didn’t exactly set the charts alight. She remembers, “I was really angry and I saw myself being treated like a product. I felt like a buffet – not very appealing, but there’s a huge quantity of it. I’d been touring for 15 years and I really desired some gravity in my personal life.”
It was then she decided to stop living out of a suitcase and base herself in LA, purchasing her “spiritual home”, a Beverly Hills mansion formerly owned by Hollywood legend Rock Hudson. It’s where she’s sitting as she chats on the phone to the Weekly and where she still lives with her long-time partner Jamie Price, whom KD credits as a hugely stabilising influence on her life, along with her Buddhist faith.
KD has no regrets about announcing her sexuality to the world but suspects it has had a negative long-term effect on her album sales. “It gave me one big record and got me a few magazine covers, but otherwise I may have had a stronger career that was more focused on my music in the following 10 or 15 years.”
However, while she may have had trouble selling albums overseas, New Zealand’s craving for KD’s music has remained constant, with her new greatest-hits compilation Recollection coming very close to topping the charts. KD suspects her popularity in Aotearoa may be because of the similarities between our country and her homeland of Canada.
She muses, “Both places are really close to nature, which is something that must come across in my music. There’s a lot of ocean and a lot of land but not too many people. I always love the opportunity to come to New Zealand. The people are so warm and down-to-earth, and the countryside is just stellar.”
