Sophisticated Simplicity

There’s something to be said for a good swooner. You know, one of those musicians who really doesn’t mind going light-headed while belting out a high note for a lost lover. Love song devotees. The type who — no matter what — always sound sad when singing about love, whether it’s being in love, falling out of love or in the pursuit of love.

From the time her mainstream hit, “Constant Craving,” worked its way up the charts to win her a Grammy, Alberta’s k.d. lang established herself as exactly this type of musician. A more understated, down-tempo version of post-menopausal matrons like Bonnie Raitt and Annie Lennox, lang’s steady pipes swooned her in and out of the 1990s with her honest, no-frills love ballads. Winning over swaths of fans with her simplicity and straight-forwardness, lang’s songs dripped with love-inflicted battle scars. This familiarity and honesty propelled her from a sort-of-popular Roy Orbison backup singer to the tape decks of love-starved soccer moms worldwide.

Despite the dotting of “Constant Craving” on elevator and linen department soundtracks in more recent years, lang has hardly fallen from the public eye. Her 2003 collaboration with Tony Bennett on their album A Wonderful World earned lang even more attention and another Grammy award. She continued to lend her songwriting chops to various movie soundtracks (Happy Feet, Home on the Range) and her androgynous looks to film and television. Beyond music, lang, a lesbian and vegetarian, is a well-known activist for AIDS research and animal rights.

More recently, she has started to stray from her typical demographic, reinventing herself by signing to Nonesuch Records (home of Wilco, the Black Keys, Magnetic Fields) and recording with not-so-croony artists like Madeleine Peyroux and Nellie McKay.

Despite her recent genre bending on her 2009 album, Watershed, lang’s steady swoon still stays afloat. This new record — her first self-produced work — breaks beyond her usual turf and shows the lasting influence of her collaborators, dipping her toes in country, jazz and lounge-inspired territories, but not straying too far from the k.d. that made her a household name.

k.d. lang at the Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox on Saturday, March 21, at 8 pm. All-ages. Tickets: $36-$69. Call: 624-1200.