#cw for language surrounding lang’s body

[gatheringbones]

[“Onstage in Amsterdam a few nights later, she closes the show with “Big-Boned Gal,” introducing the song with the kind of thunderous, rollicking drumroll that ushers in the elephants at the circus. Sashaying across the stage in a hilarious parody of feminine wiles, lang belts the lyrics with her usual high voltage: “She was a big-boned gal / From southern Alberta / You just couldn’t call her small / And you can bet every Saturday night / She’d be headed for the legion hall. . . . You could tell she was ready / by the look in her eye. . . . She walked with grace / As she entered the place / Yeah, the big-boned gal was proud!” The song is the kind of irresistible country rocker that makes you want to get up and dance, and lang also makes it extremely funny, but like most of her work it resonates on deeper levels as well. She takes everything a woman is not supposed to be—big, funny, fearlessly defiant, physically powerful—and makes it not only O.K. but glorious. What appears on the surface to be just another good-time country song turns into a thrilling statement of triumphant self-assertion.

When she finishes, the audience erupts. By this time lang has shed her jacket to show a loose, flowing white blouse that drapes fluidly over her body, revealing the womanly fullness of her hips for the first time. A black bra is just barely visible underneath. The audience is screaming and jumping up and down; they will not desist. When lang comes back for her first encore, it’s “Crying,” the Roy Orbison classic she has made her own. Her rendition is awesome; this is the number that brought down the house when she sang it on the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame TV special after Orbison’s death. You watch with your heart in your mouth, wanting it never to end. When it does, all hell breaks loose again. Lang’s final encore is “Barefoot,” the song she wrote with Bob Telson for Salmonberries. “I’d walk through the snow barefoot / If you’d open up your door,” she sings, the soaring purity of her voice conjuring up the vast, frozen bleakness of the Far North, the ache of a lonely heart, the ineffable yearning for a love to thaw the soul. The song’s chorus is a haunting wolf howl that vaults through the octaves, reverberating in an unforgettable cry of longing. It’s a passage to defeat almost any singer, but lang makes it seem effortless, her tones so rich and full you feel as if they’re pouring over you like honey. Long after the concert is over, her melodies linger in y our mind, echoing with the unearthly power of the wolf howl.

By this time a cluster of fans has found the stage door; charged with hope, they wait eagerly, their faces raised to the balmy breeze ruffling the canal in front of the theater. Lang is wandering down a corridor backstage, fretting over the fact that she forgot to introduce her drummer and brooding about whether the concert was good enough, a question that wouldn’t even occur to anyone else but that tortures her after every performance. Compared with her electrifying presence onstage, she seems only half there—not tired but simply absent, a faraway look in her eyes. A large part of her has just shut down, and will not reawaken until the next time she gets onstage in front of an audience.”]

k.d. lang cuts it close, by leslie bennetts, vanity fair, 1993