k.d. lang - Ingénue (25th Anniversary Edition) (2017)

Canadian, lesbian, crooner, country. This reductive four of a kind is a small piece of sellotape that has stuck to KD Lang’s fingers for years. Pop oddity, kind of a cult artist whom we love for her timelessness, precisely for the atypical nature of her artistic choices, Kathryn Dawn Lang isn’t only the lucky charm of people of taste, musically enlightened, the dish that you can only appreciate if you’ve mastered whole sides of the American folk music, from Nashville to Broadway. She’s above genres then… But it’s in the land of country music that the singer has made a name for herself at the end of the 80s, first by covering the classics made popular by the great Patsy Cline. Androgynous attitude, polished arrangements and velvet voice, Nashville sung by KD Lang isn’t a cowboy parade at Disney. With the Canadian, the pedal steel, typical instrument of the genre, is impressionist. As for her voice, it curls up more in the silk of a melancholy specific to crooners than in the yodels originating from cowboys. A bit like her idol Roy Orbison, with which she had the chance to sing when she was only 26. All these singularities are at the heart of Ingénue, which she released in March 1992. A splendid second album that gathers all the elements from her very personal cabaret and shines on songs like Constant Craving, Miss Chatelaine and The Mind Of Love. It’s a highly refined disc which just turned 25, in a remastered edition embellished with eight new titles taken from an MTV Unplugged recorded by KD Lang in 1993 in New York.