PORTLAND, Ore. — There’s a touch of silver now in K. D. Lang’s punk pompadour, which she still clips herself with whatever is at hand: grape shears, cuticle scissors, a paring knife. And she still performs barefoot, a habit acquired because she was tired of the plastic Payless boots she used to favor in deference to her vegan beliefs. But Ms. Lang, 56, has put aside the stirring androgyne character she inhabited 25 years ago, when she transformed herself from the curiously campy Canadian cowgirl with the languid vibrato into the torch singer behind the postapocalyptic cabaret album, as she once described it, called “Ingénue.”

The record, which went platinum, made Ms. Lang a superstar, and its closing song, the erotic pop lamentation “Constant Craving,” earned her a third Grammy. (She won a fourth in 2004 for “What a Wonderful World,” recorded with Tony Bennett for an album of American standards).

It would also become Ms. Lang’s “Free Bird”: the song she would seemingly have to play at the close of every show for the rest of her life, extending her microphone toward her audience, as that ritual dictates, so they could render its refrain back to her, ecstatically off key. Not that she wasn’t happy to do so. “That’s what people want,” she said, though when she wrote the song, she was annoyed by it. “I knew it was a hit, and I was mad at it for that. I felt that it was a sellout at the time.”