Click here to listen to Coming Home from Watershed

When you listen to her new record, Watershed – as you definitely should if you have any interest in seriously beautiful songs – you may wonder what happened to the Canadian singer Kathy Lang, or “kd lang”, as her artfully professional alias styles her, after stardom hit her like a train in the 1990s. In her own quizzical way, so does she.

Looking back now on that mad time when she and big celebrity were engaged in a very public affair, Lang is philosophical. She doesn’t regret touting herself as the poster girl of lesbian chic when she appeared on an iconic 1992 cover of Vanity Fair magazine sitting in a barber’s chair being shaved by the supermodel Cindy Crawford. She is proud of her saucy reply to a male journalist who asked what was going through her mind at the time: “Pretty much what would have been going through yours in the same circumstances, I imagine.”

She says she enjoyed being courted by Madonna, then busily appointing herself pop’s ambassador for the gay community, posing for the paparazzi with her bisexual arm candy Sandra Bernhard.

Madge’s much-quoted line about Lang – “Elvis is alive, and she’s beautiful” – tickled her. So did the (unfounded) rumours that she was having an affair with Martina Navratilova. She loved being invited to the fashion shows, the Bel Air parties and all the other stellar hoopla that came with her inclusion on LA’s A-list. At least, she did for a while.

“It was fantastic, but it’s like a sugar high. I kind of got sucked in and thought that all these people were into me, when really they just want to share your aura of success, participate in that energy. I came to realise how superficial and temporary it is.”

Though Lang has been a resident of the Hollywood Hills for the past 16 years – she currently lives in a wood-and-stone cabin just off Mulholland Drive, where the actor Rock Hudson and his lover Tab Hunter hooked up for gay trysts – she keeps a much lower profile.

She is occasionally snapped eating out at Mr Chow in Beverly Hills, but when she isn’t working, Lang is mostly a homebody, living quietly with a girlfriend she refers to as “my wife” – they’re not legally married – and her two dogs. Now 46, her dress sense is unfabulous to the point of sloppy and her preferred hairstyle is middle-aged bed head. Shy but friendly and meticulously polite, she appears completely at ease with herself, and happy to talk about personal stuff and relationships, which in the past she avoided “in case I jinxed them”.

Ten years after the media brouhaha died down, Lang admits she feels uncomfortable with the exploitation of her lesbianism. “I kind of knew it was titillating and careless. But the direction of the time was so much about sex.” Much as she liked Madonna personally, she found the gay posturing “tiresome. A friend of mine said we should go around ‘inning’ all the people who were acting gay”. Lang went along with it, she says, “because Aids had created such an atmosphere of homophobia, and because Queer Nation [a gay pressure group] were outing people, I thought, ‘They’re going to out me’”.

Lang’s gayness, it must be said, was hardly a secret. She told her mother when she was 17; her friends all knew, as did many of the fans of her early country-style records, which featured images of a spiky-haired, big-boned young woman in full cowboy garb, sporting an enigmatic, sly grin.

At the time, openly gay pop stars were still a rarity – Michael Stipe of REM, George Michael and Morrissey were all still in the closet, and the recent Aids-related death of Freddie Mercury had come as a shock to many Queen fans. So Lang’s flamboyant declaration was very big news.

No female pop starlet had ever come out in this way before. And with two Grammy awards already under her belt and a multi-million-selling album, Ingénue, flying out of the shops and earning her a third, Lang was the hottest new kid on the block, of either sex, in 1992.

“I’d turned 30. I thought it was the most responsible thing to do, for myself and for society.” For the next three years, every interview she gave, be it for a gay magazine such as The Advocate, a tabloid daily or a women’s title, inevitably centred on her sexual orientation.

But was it detrimental to her career? While nobody has ever doubted the outstanding quality of her vocals – and she has carried on winning awards, most recently a Grammy in 2003 for her collaboration with the veteran crooner Tony Bennett – Lang has not come close to repeating the commercial or artistic success she achieved with Ingénue.

Many of the people who bought that album may still be wondering what became of the most gifted torch singer pop has produced since Peggy Lee, a performer equally hailed in country circles as the heiress to the late, great Patsy Cline.

Even those who kept up with Lang’s releases in the late 1990s must have been slightly discouraged by her last three albums, a slew of cover versions of Louis Armstrong numbers (2002’s A Wonderful World), songs by fellow Canadians (Hymns of the 49th Parallel, 2004) and, in 2006, a remixed reissue of some of her own earliest country recordings. She has put out no new original material in the eight years since she released Invincible Summer.

Lang admits that she has been suffering from writer’s block, a problem that has bothered her in the past, which is why she called her song-publishing company Pulling Teeth.

She says this got much worse “because of the atmosphere post-9/11, which made most artists take stock and ask, ‘Am I supposed to be political or spiritual?’” She also says that working on other people’s songs “left me with a strong sense of what a good song sounds like. That sort of changed my DNA as a songwriter”.

You suspect, though, that there might be a simpler reason why she has finally come up with a masterpiece that holds its place next to, maybe even slightly above, Ingénue. After a series of failed love affairs – which she never talked much about publicly but discreetly alluded to on previous albums – Lang’s restless heart has finally found a home. Once she began living with her current girlfriend, most of the songs on her new album virtually wrote themselves in the summer of 2006, a process she describes as “shockingly easy, probably because I wasn’t taking myself so seriously. You know how you date a lot of people, then you meet your match?”

Hence Watershed, an album that honours her “wife” and also distils and reflects on much that has happened to Lang, musically and otherwise, over the past 40-odd years. It’s not her coming-out record – Lang’s songs of love and yearning are never that specific – more her coming-of-age one. “I love the idea of water always victoriously finding its way around obstacles,” she says. “That’s my magic view of what life should do.”

Kathryn Dawn Lang was born and raised in Consort, Alberta, a small town in the middle of the Canadian prairies where many of the kids she went to school with still live. Her mother, Audrey, was a teacher; her father, Fred, owned the local store. The youngest of four children, she found out most of what she needed to know about herself by the age of five.

Namely, that she was sexually drawn to girls more than she was to boys, and that she was the owner of a phenomenal voice.

“I was studying classical piano and just faking my way through it. My brother and sisters were all really good players, but I couldn’t stand the theory and the math, so my teacher said, ‘Why don’t you try to sing?’”

A year later she won her first singing competition. “I had an absolute sense of vocation, and for that reason I never paid any attention to my studies at school. I failed everything, even my high-school diploma. I only got into music college because it was the first year of the course and only four people applied.”

When she was 12 her father abruptly ran off with the woman next door, never to return. There has been speculation that this might have been the event that tipped a sensitive teenager into becoming gay. Because he bought her a motorbike at the age of nine, taught her to shoot, and generally treated her more like a son, Fred Lang is often taken to have been a defining influence on his daughter’s sexuality. “I can talk about my father all day, but I learnt a long time ago that parents are just people, and you can’t expect them to fit your idea of how things should be. They are just trying to do their best.”

In the case of Mr Lang, that meant moving to the state capital, Edmonton, with his new love and having no further contact with any of his family. Aside from a chance encounter on the street while she was a student, Lang never saw or spoke to him after the day he drove off leaving her alone in the house, in bed with flu. When he died in July 2007, she wasn’t notified – none of the Lang clan were – and so she didn’t attend the funeral. She is, however, adamant that there are no unresolved hurts.

“My grieving process was many years ago. I have a beautiful feeling of emancipation about it now, because for years my relationship with my father has been all in my mind anyway. We were physically separated and now it’s just about me and his spirit. I saw a picture of him recently, and he looked really happy. And that made me happy.”

Happiness did not come easily. Lang was nearly 30 before she fell in love for the first time. She devoted her twenties to her career, building an unrivalled reputation as the finest female vocalist of her generation. In 1987, Roy Orbison invited her to duet with him on a re-recording of his hit Crying, for which she won her first Grammy award. She earned more plaudits for her work with the legendary Nashville producer Owen Bradley, and scored another Grammy in 1989 for Best Female Country Vocal Performance with her third album, Absolute Torch and Twang.

Lang’s relationship with the hard-core country audience – always tenuous, given her butch image – then soured after she publicly espoused vegetarianism, creating an uproar that reached all the way back to Consort, where the graffiti on the town sign read “Eat Beef, Dyke!”

As she contemplated a shift of direction away to classic balladry – in the process becoming a pioneer of the 1990s vogue for easy listening – Lang developed a passion for a lesbian who was living in LA and in a relationship with another woman. The Canadian country girl upped sticks from Vancouver to LA to be near her new not-quite girlfriend, and wrote and recorded Ingénue. “I loved the word because it was so sophisticated. I called the album that because the feeling of love makes you feel like a complete ingénue. I’d fallen for this real Californian girl, and the newness of the switch to living down here I found intoxicating.”

Today, Lang considers this affair to have been a symptom of emotional immaturity and careerist calculation. “I always used to gravitate towards chaotic experiences for inspiration. I would sabotage situations so that I would have fodder for songwriting, by having an affair or just breaking up.” Lang says that she has addressed this tendency in Flame of the Uninspired, a song on her new album.

The post-Ingénue celebrity circus took its toll on a songwriter, and it was seven years before Lang came up with a set of original songs with the oomph of Ingénue. The inspiration for Invincible Summer was supplied by a five-year affair with a fellow musician, Leisha Hailey, the singer in an all-girl group, the Murmurs. Lang herself insists that “we had a joyous time, high up there in terms of the energy level, and I think the album reflects that”.

The dawn of the 21st century proved a difficult time for Lang. The bust-up with Hailey was acrimonious. As it was unravelling, it transpired that her business manager had somehow misplaced $2m of her money. Lang’s creativity headed for the hills, taking cover in other people’s work. She became best buddies with Tony Bennett, recording and touring with an octogenarian evergreen whom she loves, she says, “for that old-world sophistication. Tony’s 81, and he’s still out there doing it. If he stops singing, he’ll die”.

What really started to turn things around for her, Lang thinks, was her becoming a Buddhist in 2001. This has finally helped her sort out her “priorities and motivations”. The calmness with which she now views everything from her remarkable, absconding dad to her crooked accountant and her hitherto disruptive approach to relationships, is all a part of “the way Buddhism inverts your preconceptions”.

She says she always believed in the idea of reincarnation, “even as a teenager”, but that until she met her teacher “it was like having a car but not knowing how to drive”. Lang found herself with a new companion, a fellow Buddhist who works as a volunteer for various Buddhist organisations. “She is very honest with me, very mature and intelligent; incredibly honest in refining my best attributes and curbing my less attractive ones.” Which are? “Being flirty. And careless. For me, being careless has always been the big one.”

Gone are the days when a careless Kathy Lang would allow journalists into her home for interviews and chat about the Hudson/Hunter “sexual vibe” that first attracted her to buy the place. Today she says: “It’s crazy for the gay community to let itself be defined by its sexual preferences.”

She will happily talk about how “the Beverly Hills marble is not my style”. How she much prefers Hollywood rustic – the sycamore wood that adjoins her modest cabin in the hills, the bougainvillea-lined hiking paths that pass near it, and the two dogs she loves to play with in the garden – “They think I’m one of the pack!”

But home now is where the heart is, and professional contacts are kept at a distance. While we’ve been talking as Lang and her new band are preparing for the 2008 world tour, her ironically styled “wife” has been preparing the supper: veggie coconut curry, Lang’s favourite.

The only relationship that now gives Lang any serious cause for concern is the one she has with her singing voice. She worries about a tendency to over-emote, rather than, as she prefers, simply to inhabit and animate the song. “Part of the process is learning how not to force your voice. And that’s really hard.” She says she now disapproves of some of her most celebrated performances, notably the duet with Roy Orbison.

Then again, the Buddhist in her, or something, tells Lang that at this point in her life she should stop beating herself up about the mistakes of her past and just revel now in her extraordinary talent. “When you have a 12-cylinder engine, I guess it’s hard not to put the pedal to the metal sometimes,” she says with a parting grin .

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