Spiced with bits and tidbits of country twang, jazz improvisation, Brazilian beats, English and French languages, classically structured chords, existential angst, romantic bliss, Buddhist teachings and an outsider coming to grips with an ever changing world (for the better?), Watershed serves up a dish that in many ways culminates the thematic tastes of her earlier releases, such as Shadowland (country twang and American torch) Drag (gendering smoking torch-her songs), Absolute Torture and Twang (Americana country through the eyes of an outsider) and Hymns of the 48th Parallel (covers of Canadian catalysts). An artist known for playing with various musical “genres” (a meaningless word, plural or singular, serving only market interests), Watershed, in some ways, seems to deliberately debunk the notion of genre and classification. It is indeed a watershed moment if lang continues down this river of change.

Born on November 2, 1961 (Happy Birthday!) in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Kathryn Dawn Lang grew up on the Canadian prairie in Consort, Alberta with her two older sisters, Jo Ann and Kellie and her older brother, John. An “extraordinary” musical and artistic family, lang’s parents, Audrey (a teacher) and Frederick Lang (a pharmacist) introduced their children to the arts at a young age with each of the Lang children studying classical piano (her brother was a child prodigy). With a population of 650 and the nearest city Edmonton, Alberta, four hours away via gravel roads, music was one of the few thing accessible for the young Kathryn (the initials and lower case of k.d. lang is reportedly a tribute to poet e.e. cummings) while growing up in Consort.

As far as her sexual orientation went (and goes) lang knew by the time she was a 5-year-old taking swimming lessons from a female swimming instructor named Christy that boys would always have cooties. Lang came out to herself when she was in her early teens. By the time she was 16, she was hitting the gay bars in Edmonton before she even had her driver’s license. At 17 she came out to her mother. Seventeen years later at the age of 30 lang came out to everyone else.

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