k.d. lang's Ingenue at 30
When k.d. lang released the album Ingenue on March 17, 1992, it was like nothing we had heard before. It reimagined adult contemporary music with a seductive edge in a style that she described as “post-nuclear cabaret” or “nouveau easy listening”.
Ingenue was the Canadian singer’s first album of all original material and with songs like ‘Constant Craving’ it became a instant and massive hit.
But it was also a major milestone in the LGBTQ movement of the early 1990s.
Three months after Ingenue was released, lang came out in a cover story for the LGBTQ magazine The Advocate. In 2017 she told NPR that at the time the activist group Queer Nation was regularly outing people and she felt a responsibility to come out and take some of the air out of it.
Lang’s record company did not want her to do it but she went ahead anyway helping to spark a shift in the national conversation about what it meant to be gay.
In the Advocate article lang confirmed that Ingénue which she co-wrote with Ben Mink, her longtime collaborator and band leader, was in part about her love affair with a married person.
Later that year lang made news again with another provocative magazine cover. The singer appeared on the front of Vanity Fair with super model Cindy Crawford in one of the most talked about photos of the decade.
Lang had spent decades trying to make it as a country singer and had some success when she joined Roy Orbison in 1987 to re-record his song ‘Crying’ as a duet. The song won a Grammy for best Country Collaboration with Vocals the next year.
But it wasn’t until she released the genre-warping album Ingenue that Lang burst onto the mainstream. Ingenue went multi-platinum and was nominated for several Grammy’s, winning the award for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Female for ‘Constant Craving.’
When reflecting on the album lang told NPR in 2017 that she knew as they made it that they were creating something provocative. “I felt like we were making a piece of art, and I have to say that when I look at it today, I still feel very proud.”
In May 2021 lang released Makeover, a collection of dance remixes of some of her best loved songs. And you may have heard her voice at the recent winter Olympics when US skater Mariah Bell performed her free skate to lang’s cover of the Leonard Cohen song ‘Hallelujah.’