After 25 years in the business, the original butch kd lang is releasing her first-ever career retrospective. She speaks to Garrett Bithell about music, labels and being an old-school gay.

“You’re my number two so you’re getting fresh, fresh, fresh!”

So says kd lang down the phone line from her home in Los Angeles. She’s on the promo trail again in support of her first-ever career retrospective, Recollection, which celebrates 25 years as a recording artist – certainly no mean feat. As it happens, SX is only her second interview of the day, so she’s raring to go.

“It’s definitely been a trip down a rocky, crazy memory lane,” she remarks about the album, which features 22 of her most loved recordings, including an all-new interpretation of the Leonard Cohen classic ‘Hallelujah’, as well as a third disc of previously unreleased recordings. “I feel a little sense of accomplishment – being in the music business for 25 years and keeping my head above water. It’s a difficult thing to do! I also feel happy because I can see the unbridled enthusiasm I had at the beginning of my career, and I can look at myself through the different stages of development – or regression, I’m not really sure!”

lang has also watched the music industry itself change exponentially – it was a very different beast when her debut came out in 1984. “When I started out, I used to go and hang at the record company,” lang remembers. “I’d hang there all day sometimes – grab a beer, walk around, talk to people, learn about it. Now I have to have a security clearance and show my ID!

“But the mainstream aspect of music today is really boring – it’s focussed on image and accessibility. Right now we’re really immersed in the American Idol context – and unfortunately what that does is consume the industry and the music media to such an extent that if there was a Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan coming out today, how would they even be noticed? They wouldn’t win American Idol.”

But it’s not all bad, lang asserts. “The internet and the music that’s available to you from independent arenas is wide open and so exciting – I’m more into music than I’ve ever been,” she says. “It’s similar to the difference between painting and when cameras became accessible to everyone – it changed how we capture images. With music now, everyone is able to make a professional-quality record on their computer. It’s enabled people to be more expressive in a fiscally accessible way, and that’s really exciting.”

As we talk, the federal challenge to Proposition 8 is raging on, and lang, who has been with girlfriend Jamie Price for eight years, is in two minds. “I’m kind of an anomaly, because I’m an old-school gay,” she laughs. “That sounds like a good country song doesn’t it?! But I actually like the cryptic aspect of the culture, and to me marriage doesn’t hold much mystique so I don’t have much emotional connection to Prop 8.

“However, to me it’s an absolute no-brainer. Of course gays should have the right to be married and have the same legal protection, and tax exemptions, as everyone else. It’s a separation of church and state issue – and a human rights issue.”

For someone who has long been known as the ultimate butch – she was on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1993 getting shaved by Cindy Crawford – lang believes that in the not-too-distant future, labels around sexuality will be dispensed with. “Historically, once ignorance is dispelled by proxy – by familiarity – these things tend to go away,” she muses. “But the whole sexual revolution – gay, bisexual, transgender – is relatively new on the tongue, and in the ears of society. But of course those labels will eventually go away.”

Recollection is out on February 9.

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