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"You're so well behaved for San Francisco it's kind of unnerving," exclaimed k.d. lang halfway through her first of two sold-out shows at the Palace of Fine Arts this week. And she has a point. San Franciscans -- particularly of the lesbian variety -- have typically shown their devotion to the singer with an outpouring of emotion, hormones, and outright solicitations for sex at her concerts with a fervency only second to Morrissey fans.
Back in the late '80s and early '90s, right before "Constant Craving" delivered her to straight mainstream America, lang shows in San Francisco were a queer ritual second in popularity only to attending the memorials of friends who died of AIDS. And there was undoubtedly a relationship between the two: The energy held respectfully in check during those times of mourning would come gushing out at lang shows to the point that she routinely had to hush the crowd just to get through them. And it wasn't just lesbians: With her square frame decked out in flashy suits and her pompadour reaching toward the stars, lang resembled the androgynous young Elvis and radiated a similar, all-encompassing charisma. The only gay men at the time who wouldn't admit to being turned by lang were liars.
It was an older incarnation of this same audience that turned up at the Palace to see lang perform her first album of self-penned material since 2000's lovely Invincible Summer. Like much of the crowd, lang is a bit rounder and more sedate. Decked out in layered black and silver, she revealed few of the New Wave and performance art influences she once wielded as freely as her commanding croon. Her new album, Watershed, is a subtle, often symphonic affair light on hooks and heavy on reflection, though repeated listening reveals dreamlike attributes that rank it among her best. She obviously agrees: Rather than playing it safe with the usual greatest-hits vet set, lang sang every single song from Watershed Tuesday night with lulling, hypnotic results.
Some of the crowd's reticence came down to the sound itself: It was astounding. As its name suggests, the Palace of Fine Arts is a swanky place with a wide, curtained stage upon which rockers rarely tread. Now I should point out here that acoustics in many San Francisco music venues are often downright awful, and the chatter from concertgoers can be so loud that I once saw Martha Wainwright nearly break down in tears from the din that drowned out a solo set. But here the sonics and the sound mix were so impeccable that it felt as though lang and her supportive five-man band were performing in a recording studio. The only thing missing was a producer to proclaim "That's a take!" at the end of every tune. No wonder the fans didn't dare utter a peep until she nudged them.
Although she alluded to her mischievous cow-punk past only during a Grand Ole Opry-style encore of "Pay Dirt" from her 1987 US debut Angel with a Lariat, lang can still command a stage. She's paid tribute to the old-school entertainers for so long that she no longer needs to give her famously grand hand gestures a sense of quotation. She's now old-school herself. And her voice: It's more superhumanly expressive than ever, particularly on her well-chosen covers. The first standing ovation came for her rendition of "The Valley" by Jane Siberry (the divine fellow Canadian singer who's recently undergone a name and identity change to Issa). The second ovation was for the very next song, a rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" that blew all others (yes, even those performed by Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, and American Idol's Jason Castro) out of the proverbial water that served as a recurring theme during the night's luminous new material. lang has always been a singer's singer blessed with both raw power and blinding technique. But her sense of dynamics is now so finely tuned than she seemed to embody a lifetime of emotions in the song's five minutes. Her "Hallelujah" was heaven itself.
-- BARRY WALTERS
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