K.d. lang Ingénue Redux tour comes east
Singer will play Scotiabank Centre Sept. 9, Port Cities to open Halifax show
One of the first things k.d. lang mentions when she talks about how excited she is to come to St. John’s is her favourite restaurant, India Gate.
Speaking during a phone interview when the restaurant was still under renovations, lang wasn’t happy to hear it was closed.
“Shut up! That’s it, I’m cancelling,” she says playfully.
Lang will be happy to know India Gate is open again, and she’ll be able to get her fix of Indian food when she’s in town for a show at Mile One Centre on Sept. 14.
She’s also scheduled to perform at the Scotiabank Centre in Halifax on Sept. 9 at 7:30 p.m.
They are among the 16 Canadian dates on her Ingénue Redux tour, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of Ingénue, her second album and the one that propelled her to international
stardom. The album included the worldwide hit “Constant Craving,” and “Miss Chatelaine.”
“Twenty-five years. I know,” lang says in disbelief over the passage of time. She had been eyeing the 25-year mark of the album, she says, thinking of perhaps touring it again, since it seems to be the trendy thing to do now. The record
is also a big one for lang, representative of some rich emotion.
“From the most successful moment in my career to the controversy, coming out and the Vanity Fair cover and all that, all those things came with a lot of processes, navigating through emotional minefields.”
At the time it was released, Ingénue wasn’t much like anything lang had ever recorded before, and far from the popular Madonna/Nirvana music that was big back then. It had a sort of cabaret feel.
“I came out with this big album of, I don’t know, European burlesque music, some sort of melancholy something,” lang says.
Ingénue ended up going double platinum in Canada and the U.S. and platinum in the U.K., and earning Lang six 1993 Grammy nominations, with a Grammy win for best female pop vocal performance for “Constant Craving.” It also earned her three Juno Awards the same year.
The album remains iconic to many of lang’s fans, for all kinds of reasons, not all of them musicrelated.
“I guess I was kind of an ambassador or visibility for people who were maybe struggling with being gay to realize there was someone else out there. This was before the internet,” lang says. “Being gay, and especially growing up somewhere like smalltown Alberta, you do feel isolated and alone.”
Lang will perform the entire Ingénue album on stage during her show, as well as some songs from her 2004 album, Hymns From the 49th Parallel, which features tracks by some of her favourite Canadian artists. Among them: a shiver-inducing rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” said to have been his favourite among the plethora of cover versions of the song.
Lang has been named an official Canada 150 ambassador, and to that end, she and her team have personally chosen an opening act in each city on her tour. In Halifax, that spot will be filled by up-and-coming Nova Scotia band Port Cities.
“Promoters in each city sent me some names and YouTube links and I went through them all. There were so many and it was very, very difficult to choose.”