Lang grew up in the farming community of Consort, Alberta (pop. 650). "Yes, I was one of the eccentrics in town, but I was also very athletic and involved in school, so it was mixed. I started playing classical piano and eventually moved to guitar... Growing up in a small place has definitely had a bearing on how I relate to an audience. You know everyone in a prairie town, and it has something to do with openness – the prairies have helped me to appreciate minimalism."

Then in 1982, one Kathy Dawn Lang sauntered into a recording studio in Edmonton to audition for the job as lead vocalist in a band patterned after Bob Will's Texas Playboy's. The job was hers in a matter of minutes.

"Mind you, anyone who can sing that well lying on the studio floor or draped over the grand piano should be incredible standing up," an observer to the auditions remarked.

That particular band was short-lived: a dozen rehearsals and one gig. But all 600 folks who witnessed the one gig, reacted to Lang's voice like they knew she was not going to be relegated to obscurity for long. Six months later, k.d. and her band, the reclines, were setting Prairie clubs on their collective ears with packed houses and line-ups night after night.

Lang, 23, became a hometown star in Edmonton, when she abandoned a satirical folk act and dared to give country music a physical- and metaphysical jolt. But her style is about as easy to nail down as a bowl of jello. She describes it as, "a hootenanny wingding, daddy-o of a good time."

This woman is hot – a powerful voice with a marvelous range – that in any given song can go from soft, bad rasp (Peggy-Lee-like), to a clear raunchy rock n' roll Elvis Costello-like).

On stage she's a dervish, a shivering bag of antics. She's a manic dancer, full of jerky movements and pretend slips and slides, one minute standing on a ringside table, the next lying on the stage floor, the next just standing there, arms above her head, hips swiveling in a take-off of Elvis Presley.