liner notes

k.d. lang’s Watershed Moment

k.d. lang has been waiting for this moment for 25 years — no, not the chance to speak with Famous magazine, but to talk about an album she produced.

The 46-year-old Alberta native with the pitch-perfect voice has released 13 albums, won eight Junos and four Grammys, but has never produced any of her albums entirely on her own, that is until watershed (available February 5th).

“I had been producing for 25 years, but just never solo...it’s my Amelia Earhart moment, but that didn’t turn out so good,” lang says with a laugh during a recent interview in Toronto.

“In the back of my mind it was there. It’s something I always wanted to do, but it was something I was afraid to do. I was writing a lot, and the bar had been set incredibly, dauntingly high with hymns of the 49th parallel,” she says of her critically acclaimed 2004 CD of songs by Canadian singer-songwriters. “But in a way that was completely emancipating because it shifted what was important to me and what felt natural and what felt good.”

The 11 songs on watershed are unadorned musings that lang admits are autobiographical nuggets about love, loss and finding pleasure in life’s quieter moments. And it’s a record about facing her fears.

“reintarnation [lang’s 2006 compilation CD featuring her best country songs] gave me a lot of confidence, ’cause I really loved myself in the beginning, I just loved that unbridled, unrestrained...I was just so not afraid of anything back then.

I just thought, ‘You are the same person, so, just do it.’

“watershed is about looking at myself, looking at my fears, looking at how I am stagnant because of my habitual patterns, and how I should go around an obstacle like water flowing around an object.”

Some of the songs were recorded in one take, and when you hear the elegiac “shadow and the frame” it’s hard to believe it’s the first time lang ever sang the song out loud.

“It was done in my living room and there was a lot of noise, you could hear me moving papers, and I tried singing it again — and I won’t say I’ll never sing it that good again — but there was something about the first time you had to walk away from and not touch.”

lang has always strived to take the theatrics out of her performances and simply let her voice carry a song. So is she dispirited at the American Idol-inspired trilling and emoting that plagues many of today’s singers?

“You know, that singing is basically a characterization of something that is real. But I don’t despair because there are so many great singers. I think Christina Aguilera is a really good singer, I think Amy Winehouse is a fantastic singer, I do. I’m just different.”

–Ingrid Randoja