Advertisement
Don't be fooled by the "Please, no caps" punctuation in her name -- there's nothing understated or modest about Canadian chanteuse k.d. lang. As an alternative country singer, she once yodeled songs about big boned gals and brandished flashy cornpoke duds that would have shamed Gene Autry. In her current guise as a boomer-friendly crossover pop artist, she's switched to jazzy ballads, sharply tailored, pin-striped suits, and a decidedly yuppie-centric ticket price of $62. lang may be a genre-hopping chameleon, but when she changes her style, she flaunts it for all its worth.
Thursday night at Radio City Music Hall in New York, lang was in full torch-song swing, evoking Etta James and Billie Holiday more often than Patsy Cline and drawing almost exclusively from her latest album of cover songs, Drag. The theme of the album being smoking, lang and her seven-member band opened with a languid "Don't Smoke in Bed" and played such standards as "Smoke Dreams," "My Old Addiction," and "Smoke Rings." Get it? The sole offering from lang's bona-fide country phase, "Pullin' Back the Reins," came as a much-needed breath of fresh air.
Still, even when her chosen theme grew stale, lang still proved herself to be an almost Sinatra-perfect interpreter of pop standards. For every misstep -- including several bouts of vocal histrionics worthy of Celine Dion and a bombastic cover of Roy Orbison's "Crying" that pummeled the fragile sentiment of the original -- there were several moments of interpretive brilliance. As sung by Steve Miller, "The Joker" -- particularly the lyric "I really love your peaches/ Let me shake your tree" -- is just plain silly. Wrap it in velvet and hand it to lang, however, and the line sounds evocative and positively sexy. With the same magic touch, she closed the set with an unapologeticaly sincere and majestic version of "The Air That I Breathe."
Returning for her first of two encores, lang seemed weary but good-natured about the inevitable chore before her: "Now we will perform for you a medley of my hit," she cracked by way of introduction of "Constant Craving," (the melody of which earned her a writing credit on the Rolling Stones' "Anybody Seen My Baby?"). A strong cover of Patsy Cline's "Two Cigarettes in an Ashtray" carried more conviction, but it was not until the second encore and the evening's final song -- her own achingly beautiful "Maybe" -- that the concert reached its peak. "It takes you by surprise," she intoned over sparse instrumental backing, her hushed voice filling the theater. Hardly, but undeniably pleasant all the same.