'Watershed,' the new album from k.d. lang marks, well, just that for the Canadian crooner, as the effort is the first lang self-produced in her 25-year career. But she tells Spinner that wasn't necessarily her original intention. "I went through a lot of looking for other producers and thinking about what direction I wanted to take this album," lang says. "I realized I didn't want to take this album in any direction. I'm the direction, the songs are the direction and I made that decision. The thing is I've come to a point in my life -- not just musically -- that being honest with myself is much easier than the alternative."

'Watershed' is the first album of new material penned by lang, since 2000's 'Invincible Summer' (in the interim she released 'A Wonderful World,' a duets album with Tony Bennett, as well as 'Hymns of the 49th Parallel,' a collection of covers of her favorite songs by Canadian songwriters). Despite the eight-year lag between original songs, lang says there was no writer's block. "The thing that struck me the most about this record was actually how easy it was to write," she says. "Usually, it's a very arduous process for me, but because there were no time constraints, I didn't feel like I had to produce 10 or 11 songs that were stellar right away. I really just wrote what I was feeling."

Talk to lang and it's clear she's reached a point of maturity in both her music and beyond. "The older you get, the more you've carved out your basic nature a little bit," she says. "[And] subtlety is more interesting both for the artist and the audience because it allows interpretation of the listener and the artist to flourish. Being able to transcend the actual theme of the lyric and go into the more esoteric understanding, or this more metaphysical understanding of the lyric, is a very, very important thing. I don't think it stops at music; I think it applies to everything."

After a quarter century run that's seen her enjoy widespread success, lang believes she has settled just fine into her own skin. "When 'Ingenue' came out and I came out as a lesbian, there was a lot of focus on my persona -- what I stood for, what I didn't stand for politically and all that," she says. "Now, all the focus is shifting to my music. I haven't really changed my hair or my clothes in the past 17 years, so all the peripheral stuff has dissipated a bit. What's important is the singer and the song now. And I feel very comfortable with that."