K. D. Lang
From Philosopedia
K. D. Lang (2 November 1961 - )
Kathryn Dawn Lang, the daughter of Audrey and drugstore manager Fred Lang - who were of Icelandic and German descent - was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada but grew up in Consort, Alberta, population around 650, with her two sisters and a brother. When her father left with the next-door neighbor and re-married, Lang supported her devastated mother, drove the car, shoveled the snow, mowed the lawn, tasks her father had completed. When 20, she bumped into her father on the street, and he barely recognized her.
Lang attended Red Deer College, chose a career as a professional singer, and became a Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter.
Ariel Levy in New York (18 February 2008) described Lang's "vaguely Inuit eyes" and her heritage: Icelandic, Sioux, Dutch, English, Irish, Scottish, and German Jewish.
In 1992 she came out as a lesbian and has supported HIV/AIDS care and research. Lang practices Tibetan Buddhism and is a vegetarian whose "Meat Stinks" campaign was controversial, particularly in the Alberta cattle ranching area in which she had grown up.
Of Watershed, her 2008 album, she has written,
- "The idea of watershed has a great deal of pertinence to becoming a Buddhist and following the path. It seems to me that the flow of dharma - or the flow of one's own innate buddhanature - is like water. There are obstacles, but eventually the water will find its way around them.
- A change of direction happens when you take refuge and become a practitioner. For me, it's been about reassessing, reviewing and reprioritizing everything in my life. It's been about revitalizing my morality and my relationship to cause and effect, meaning what I do as a person - with my body, speech and mind - and how it affects all other beings. Each song is about my relationship to something, and it's also about the cause and effect of each of those relationships.
In The Advocate (26 February 2008), Lang is quoted: "I spend probably over half my time volunteering and working on my Buddhist activities. Everything from cleaning toilets to fund-raising to putting up dry wall." In the interview with Caryn Ganz, conducted while she toyed with a string of brown prayer beads on her left wrist, she said, "Buddhism has had a huge, huge, huge impact on my life and my direction."
According to Ganz, she and Leisha Hailey, the subject of Invincible Summer, broke up shortly after that album's release. For more than six years, her partner has been attorney Jamie Price.
"Buddhism," Lang told her interviewer, "is sort of what Prozac wants to be. It just puts emotions into perspective and compresses them [so they're] not so polarizing and not so extreme. And I think that's a really good thing for me."
