Luscious Lang Canadian Songwriter Takes Direct Approach, Using New Ways To Deliver Emotion And Truth

Of course k.d. lang’s new album, “All You Can Eat,” is a collection of love songs. “That’s all I ever write,” the Canadian songwriter said with a shrug as she lounged on the couch of a Royalton Hotel suite. And of course, all the songs are more or less autobiographical.

“I doubt if I have any capacity to write otherwise,” she said. “How could you, really?”

Lang, who is now 33, writes about emotional states, not about the particulars of one of pop’s most singular careers. She grew up in a small farming town in Alberta, began working as a musician in her teens and dabbled in painting and performance art at college.

By the early 1980s, she was belting country music, first as affectionate parody and then with less and less irony; her voice, with its leisurely swoops and its aching vibrato, was made for ballads. “I always thought I was delivering emotion,” she said. “But as I grow older I see deeper and more intense ways to deliver emotion and truth.”

When country grew confining, lang and her longtime collaborator, Ben Mink (who plays violin, guitars and numerous other string and keyboard instruments), came up with the sumptuously surreal pop of lang’s 1992 triumph, “Ingenue.”

With that album, she broke free of genre, drifting purposefully through a musical dreamscape that encompassed country and klezmer, polkas and Tin Pan Alley, Roy Orbison and Julie London.

After it was released, lang acknowledged that she was gay, and her growing numbers of fans clearly didn’t mind. “It’s eliminated a lot of unspoken tension,” she said. “It’s really a fantastic feeling; I highly recommend it to anybody in any situation, to live in truth.”

Lang and Mink scored the 1994 film “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” But “All You Can Eat” comes across as a sultry, more down-to-earth sequel to “Ingenue”: 10 new songs filled with languorous yearning.

This time, however, lang has stripped away the metaphors and odd formality she used in songs like “Tears of Love’s Recall” and “Wash Me Clean” on “Ingenue.” “I wanted to really try to get skeletal with my emotion,” she said. “I just wanted to be very direct and literal.”

Speaking by telephone from Los Angeles, Mink said: “When we started writing, I suggested that she use more metaphors. But I think she just wanted to be more direct and use more street vernacular.”

Yet lang’s street vernacular isn’t the same as that of most current pop. “All You Can Eat” stands apart from both the overblown professions of love and the soft-porn come-ons that fill most radio stations’ ballad quotas.

She sings about intimacy and longing; she plays the shy but determined wooer, determined to entice her chosen partner, always uncertain about whether she’s wanted. They’re songs about the approach, not the consummation. “I’m always wooing someone,” she said with a smile. “We all are. Every day you’re wooing someone or someone’s wooing you.”

In “maybe,” an unhurried ballad with a melody that rises, then falls, along with the singer’s courage, she agonizes, “Maybe I’ll ask, or no, maybe I won’t.” “Could it be that I annoy you/Flaunting ways that I adore you?” she asks in “You’re O.K.” In “Sexuality,” she teases, “How bad could it be/If you should lose yourself in me?” And in “This,” she promises, “The one thing you want/This I’ll be.”

Many songs later, at least one character finds fulfillment. In “World of Love,” which chugs along with a 1960s-soul beat, a woman finds herself caressed by “the touch of the sun,” until she feels “lavish and lush, divine and holy.” The next song, “Infinite and Unforeseen,” floats in a rapt afterglow: “a place you’ve always been.”

Like the words, the music on “All You Can Eat” pares away some layers of fantasy from the arrangements on “Ingenue”; the band has its feet on the ground.

But at the edges of the music are the sounds of oddball instruments from Mink’s collection: Celtic harps, a Chinese violin called an er-hu, a hybrid violin-zither called a ukelin, cranky electric organs.

Chorales of lang’s multitracked voice glimmer into earshot, then dissolve. Just beyond everyday experience, the music suggests, is a sphere of strange delights.

For most of the album, she creates her own world of love, a private place where rapture hangs on a lover’s consent. When she sings “Acquiesce, acquiesce,” it’s hard to believe anyone could turn her down.