k.d. lang lets the music flow

She has a voice you could happily drown in, and now Canadian singer songwriter k.d. lang is celebrating the release of her latest album, Watershed, with a date at Birmingham Symphony Hall.

Watershed is her first collection of self-penned songs since 2000's Invincible Summer, a dry spell interspersed only with an album of cover versions of songs by fellow Canadians, Hymns Of The 49th Parallel and a Grammy Award-winning collaboration with Tony Bennett, A Wonderful World.

Hailed as a stunning return to form, Watershed finds lang exploring themes of love, partnership, community and, subtly, religion in a collection of beautiful melodies and spare instrumentation.

The singer is a practising Bhuddist, and credits the peace of mind her religion has given her with a new creative flowering.

She said recently: "It's been about reassessing, reviewing, and reprioritising everything in my life.

"Each song is about my relationship to something, and it's also about the cause and effect of each of those relationships."

Her UK tour follows sold out concerts in Glasgow and London earlier this year, which had the Daily Telegraph declaring "lang's voice remains a wonder to behold. Many pass themselves off as 'proper' singers, but lang is one of the few who can really, really sing".

Watershed is the first self-produced collection of lang's career. The Sunday Times called it a "masterpiece", and in a four-star review Q magazine proclaimed it "the best thing she's done since 1992's Ingénue", the album that produced her biggest hit, Constant Craving.

Born Kathryn Dawn Lang in Edmonton, Alberta in 1961, lang formed a Patsy Cline tribute band in 1983, called The Reclines.

Her solo career started with the release of A Truly Western Experience in 1984 and she concentrated on country songs with albums including Shadowland and Absolute Torch and Twang.

It was Ingénue's sophisticated, laid back adult contemporary pop sounds which truly lifted her international profile to new heights.

Since then she has mixed other albums of cover versions, such as Drag with self-penned material on albums like All You Can Eat.

• kd lang appears at Birmingham Symphony Hall on Friday, August 1. Tickets are £35. More details at www.kdlang.com, www.ticketmaster.co.uk and www.symphonyhall.co.uk