K.D. LANG Preview – Anywhere But Here

Canadian singer/songwriter k.d. lang was the winner of my recent poll by a wide margin over Hall & Oates, Grateful Dead, Los Lobos and Toto. I had hoped to begin my series on her discography by now but various personal & work responsibilities have kept that from happening. I immediately started revisiting her first few albums as soon as the poll closed and I already took notes on each album. I’ve also prepared album covers, photos and highlighted MP3 files for the first post. The only thing that’s still pending is the post itself, which usually takes a few hours to write, proof-read & upload. I expect to begin the series within the next week. Until then, one appropriately-named k.d. lang song has popped into my head and I wanted to share it with my readers.

Back in 2000, I heard a song called “Anywhere But Here” nearly every day at my gym. The voice was clearly that of k.d. lang and the music was similar to the sunny pop that filled her most recent album at the time, Invincible Summer, but this track was not on that album nor any of her other releases. With a little research I discovered that it was the theme song for a 1999 movie of the same name starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. I’ve never seen the movie nor purchased the soundtrack, and I stopped going to that gym years ago, so until recently I had forgotten about this song. To the best of my knowledge it has never appeared on any of her albums (including compilations), but thanks to the internet I was able to locate the promotional video. Since the embedding feature was disabled for that clip I’ve embedded a video with a static image of the movie poster below. The promotional video can be viewed by clicking this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djKhXqYGCsI 

I’ve been traveling a lot this past month, including three weekends where I was far from home, so it seems like I’ve been “anywhere but here” (New York) for a while. Although lyrically she’s striving to leave her surroundings while I’m eager to remain close to home, the song still strikes a chord and I hope it does the same for you. Her glorious voice and that subtly inviting melody sound as good today as they did the first time I heard it 14 years ago.