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k.d. lang

k.d. lang

 
k.d. lang  (born Kathryn Dawn Lang) is a Canadian pop and country singer-songwriter and occasional actress.  Lang has won both Juno Awards and Grammy Awards for her musical performances; hits include “Constant Craving” and “Miss Chatelaine”.  She has contributed songs to movie soundtracks and has teamed with musicians such as Roy Orbison, Tony Bennett, Elton John, Anne Murray, and Jane Siberry.  Lang is also known for being an animal rights, gay rights, and Tibetan human rights activist.  She performed Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” live at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.  Previously, she had performed at the closing ceremony of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Dion DiMucci was one of the leading rock and rollers of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and his work still sounds great to me to this day.   
 
After a long career in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and a period of Christian contemporary recordings, Dion was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and released a great comeback album called Yo Frankie in 1989.  The sticker on the cover proclaims:  “The man who invented the rock & roll attitude . . . has now perfected it.”  Produced by Dave Edmunds, the album features numerous guest appearances:  Paul Simon, Lou Reed, k.d. lang, Patty Smyth, and Bryan Adams.  Reed’s speech at the induction ceremony is also included on the sleeve. 
  
(September 2012)
 
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I was starting to listen to more country music myself by the late 1970’s; I was happily discovering country’s roots such as the Carter Family and Hank Williams Sr., and also a lot of the “outlaw country” crowd like Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and David Allan Coe.  Many of the earliest alt-country artists also caught my ear (before anyone was even using the term), like Randy Travis, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang, and Hank Williams III; and some were simply country-flavored rock bands such as the Georgia Satellites and the Kentucky Headhunters. 
 
(January 2013)
 
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Other Canadian rockers include Bryan Adams, k.d. lang, Rush, Loverboy, Klaatu, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and so many more.  Anna McGarrigle wrote the title song “Heart Like a Wheel” on Linda Ronstadt’s 1974 breakthrough album, Heart Like a Wheel that was later used as the name of a 1983 film also called Heart Like a Wheel about drag racer Shirley Muldowney; while Kate McGarrigle was married to Chapel Hill-born singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III whose union resulted in the birth of two more musicians, Rufus Wainwright and Martha Wainwright.  I have a CD somewhere that features the whole family if I remember right. 

 

(April 2013)

 
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In the article about Cris Williamson in Allmusic, William Ruhlmann offers this concise introduction:  “Just as baseball historians can only speculate about how players in the old Negro leagues would have fared in the absence of segregation in the major leagues prior to the arrival of Jackie Robinson in 1947, so music historians may ponder what status Cris Williamson might have assumed if she had emerged at a time when admitted homosexuals were not subject to exclusion from major record labels.  By the 1990’s, openly gay women artists Melissa Etheridge, Indigo Girls, and k.d. lang were able to maintain major-label contracts and sell records in the millions (although none of them had proclaimed their sexual orientation when they were signed in the 1980’s).” 
 
(January 2014)