FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
k.d. lang - Ingénue (25th anniversary edition)
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IN March…
IN THIS PHOTO: K.d. lang in 1992/PHOTO CREDIT: Jill Furmanovsky
k.d. lang’s superb second solo album, Ingénue, turns thirty. The Canadian legend’s album is one that I discovered when it came out in 1992. For this Vinyl Corner, I am going to point you in the direction of the 25th anniversary edition. We all know the single, Constant Craving, though The Mind of Love and Miss Chatelaine are other standouts. I really love all of k.d. lang’s work, and she is one of these artists who writes and sings like nobody else. I am going to quote a couple of reviews. Before that, this article from 2017 lists a series of facts regarding Ingénue. I have selected a few to highlight:
“Ingénue, released on March 17, 1992, was k.d. lang's first all-original album. She co-wrote most of the songs with her longtime collaborator and bandleader, Ben Mink.
"The fact is that in our eight years of collaboration we have only got together four times to write her entire body of work," Mink told Mat Snow in Q magazine in April 1993, a year after the record's release. "It comes out very quickly. Ingénue was written in a week and a half, though we agonised for ages over the arrangements, and she over the lyrics. We sit down with a couple of acoustic guitars and talk, but we'll start off a song with anything. If the kitchen clock falls to the ground and clanks in a certain key, that can give us enough of an idea to start something."
The album's focus on sex was referenced in many of the reviews, though perhaps none as vehemently as Phil Sutcliffe. In Q magazine he described the record as "something completely different; normal on the surface, very strange underneath" and "carefully non-gender-specific, Ingénue is head over heels in love with love and sex." According to Sutcliffe, "the moment she starts singing, she's off into the high planes of seduction," though he criticized stylistic elements of lang's balladry as "the pleasantly unsettling sensation" of "lusty sweat cooled by the all but Sinatra-like sheen" before concluding that Ingénue is "open, self-assured and sexy as a cobra."
In the interview — which is archived here — lang reaffirms that Ingénue is, at least in part, about her love affair with a married person.
"Miss Chatelaine" is a sly send-up of gendered expectations, particularly since the main thing being written about lang's appearance at that point was an appraisal and examination of her androgyny, and whether that was code for something else. Lang embraced the character of Miss Chatelaine wholeheartedly in her music video, a tongue-in-cheek, high-femme treatment that was also a tribute, in part, to The Lawrence Welk Show.
Ingénue won the Juno Award for best album in 1993, beating out a host of other albums that were also classics in the making: Celine Dion's self-titled record, the Tragically Hip's Fully Completely, Barenaked Ladies' Gordon and Blue Rodeo's Lost Together.
Lang was also nominated for several Grammy Awards in 1993, including album, song, and record of the year. She won best female pop vocal performance for "Constant Craving," and lost in the same category the following year for "Miss Chatelaine".
IN THIS PHOTO: K.d. lang and Cindy Crawford on the 1993 Vanity Fair cover/PHOTO CREDIT: Herb Ritts
Ingénue is a gorgeous album that everyone should listen to. Watershed is the latest album from lang. Released in 2008, I hope she puts out more music soon. She is an artist that transfixes you and takes you someone magical. There is no doubting the fact Ingénue is one of the best albums of the ‘90s. This is what AllMusic said about lang’s amazing second studio album:
“On her early albums, k.d. lang was a country traditionalist with a difference -- while she had a glorious voice and could evoke the risen ghost of Patsy Cline when she was of a mind, there was an intelligence and sly humor in her work that occasionally betrayed her history as a performance artist who entered the musical mainstream through the side door. And while the three years between Absolute Torch and Twang and Ingénue were full of controversy for lang that may have encouraged her to seek out new creative directions (among other things, she came out as a lesbian and her outspoken animal rights activism alienated many fans in the C&W mainstream), the former album suggested lang had already taken her interest in country music as far as it was likely to go. Ingénue presented lang as an adult contemporary artist for the first time, and if she felt any trepidation at all about her stylistic shift, you'd never guess after listening to the record; lang's vocal style is noticeably more subtle on Ingénue than her previous albums, but her command of her instrument is still complete, and the cooler surroundings allowed her to emotionally accomplish more with less.
lang's songwriting moved into a more impressionistic direction with Ingénue, and while the literal meanings of many of her tunes became less clear, she also brought a more personal stamp to her music, and the emotional core of "Save Me," "Constant Craving," and "So It Shall Be" was obvious even when their surfaces were evasive. And the production and arrangements by lang and her longtime collaborators Ben Mink and Greg Penny were at once simple and ambitious, creating a musical space that was different in form and effect than her previous albums but one where she sounded right at home. Ingénue disappoints slightly because while lang was a masterful and thoroughly enjoyable country singer, she was a far more introspective adult contemporary singer/songwriter who seemingly demanded the audience accept her "as is" or not at all. However, the craft of the album is impressive indeed, and few artists have reinvented themselves with as much poise and panache as lang did on Ingénue”.
Prior to wrapping things up, there is another interview that I wanted to include. Pitchfork provided a detailed take on k.g. lang’s 1992 masterpiece in a review in 2019. This is what Laura Snapes had to say about the masterful Ingénue:
“Ingénue—an album named for the roles ascribed to young women, and one that early screen stars wilfully exploited for professional reward—often finds lang questioning who she has become in the wilds of heartbreak. “The Mind of Love” comes from a similarly comic school to “Miss Chatelaine,” a pillowy torch song where she considers her plight with tender impatience. “Talking to myself/Causing great concern for my health,” she declares, with operatic boldness, only to circle in on the joke and ask, “Where is your head, Kathryn?” in an all-time great example of a star singing their own name. But lang also plays it dejected, a mode that can seem to weigh heavy given her evident spryness.
“Tears of Love’s Recall” is, at least technically, the album’s least interesting song—lang’s usual pin-drop vocal delivery is flattened to a series of unengaging sustained notes, and its cinematic air feels rote compared to the creativity elsewhere. And the lyrics are oblique, even tortured, like bad Shakespeare: “Love, thing of might and dread, stays the savior and poison to all of heart and head,” she sings over a pattering dirge. But what feels like emotion held at arm’s length spoke specifically to the elusive experience of queerness at the time. Reflecting on Ingénue for its 25th anniversary, lang remarked that its sometimes obtuse nature felt like a form of protection: “It was our own prison that we were trying to break out of, but it was also our comfort zone.”
On Ingénue, you hear lang brushing against the limits of internal experience. It’s an album about purgatory, a place where you work out who you are. But then there’s the lonely, self-flagellating hermitage of it. There is the private fantasy of a self, a side that lang makes genuinely sexy: “I can exist being caught by your kiss,” she belts on “So It Shall Be,” a moment of subjugation that soon melts away. “Outside Myself,” Ingénue’s most beautifully written song, explicitly evokes that dislocation: “I’ve been outside myself for so long,” she heaves, answering the earlier question from “The Mind of Love. It’s a great, rueful sigh of realization that obsession is as much self-neglect as self-indulgence.
Ingénue’s final track, “Constant Craving,” is lang’s conclusion to all this, a brilliant song about how yearning runs deep within us all, yet one that feels tacked on, in sound and in spirit. It’s brisker than everything that came before it, as if her label had asked lang to come up with a potential hit, although its plaintive accordion and melodramatic vocal tumbles probably weren’t going to shake Kriss Kross and Sir Mix-a-Lot from the top of the Billboard charts. And lang’s sanguine takeaway was another depersonalized construction—“Constant craving has always been.” She had sewed up the wound.
That it was this song that became a hit (No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100; later peaking at No. 15 in the UK) probably protected her. She released Ingénue in March 1992. Three months later, k.d. lang came out in an interview to The Advocate magazine, and her heartbreak had to bear the weight of a massive socio-cultural shift. Suddenly, Madonna was likening her to Elvis and seeing the potential in letting rumors about a dalliance spread; Cindy Crawford was sensually shaving her face on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, the best magazine cover of all time. lang enjoyed the performance of stardom for a little while before retreating again. She knew it wasn’t her”.
An album that people should grab on vinyl, Ingénue is one of those moments I remember from childhood. Constant Craving was the song that introduced me to k.d. lang. I have been a fan ever since. There are few albums finer than…
THE stunning Ingénue.