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THE SECRET LIFE OF DIANA KRALL

We thought we knew her. But on her intimate new record, our greatest jazz superstar lets us in on loving, grieving and coming home.

Text: SIMON HOUPT

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In the flickering candlelight of the Chambers Hotel bar in midtown Manhattan, Diana Krall is trying to relax. She takes a gulp of pinot noir, hunches forward to speak, then abruptly stops, blurting out an apology. "This is really hard for me because I just don’t sit down and analyze stuff like this. I just do not do it," she explains. "I can see my cheeks turning red."

At this very moment, the implications of what she has set in motion are beginning to dawn on Diana Krall, and she is terrified. She has always been a woman out of step with her time, whether as a child who preferred listening to jazz or as a performer who found hits in 50-year-old material. She is also fiercely private. For an exhibitionistic era in which we know more about some celebrities than we do about our own spouses, her defining recalcitrance is quaint, almost courtly.

But after more than a decade juicing up old torch songs and jazz standards that allowed her to stay at one emotional remove, last spring, for the first time, she began writing and recording music that mines the pain of her own life. The result will be released next month: The Girl in the Other Room, a forthright and sometimes melancholy album that reveals a Diana Krall we never knew existed. She is the girl in the other room.

In fact, at 39, her life is still carefully segregated into a geography of rooms. Some doors are locked, some slightly ajar; a few are hidden entirely unless you know just where to probe. Let Krall guide you, and don’t ask for more than she’s willing to give, unless you want all of the doors to suddenly slam shut in your face. But walk with sensitivity, and you’ll find some jewels.

You’re in a hallway that slips away to infinity. Step through the first door, on your left. There’s Krall, sitting by herself, her left hand cradling a book of black and white photographs. She looks up. "I haven’t talked about it because I was so protective of my family," she begins, "but I lost my mother on May 26, 2002." Her mom, aged 60, died after a protracted battle with multiple myeloma. A month later, Krall’s good friend Rosemary Clooney, another maternal figure, died of cancer. Four days after that, her mentor, the bassist Ray Brown, died in his sleep. Within another three months, she and her boyfriend of two years had split.

"What I carry with me is, you can’t always prevent what’s going to happen to you, but you can choose your response," she continues. "That was always my mother’s way of dealing with her disease."

Krall’s way of dealing with the tragedies was similarly defiant and clear-eyed. She sat down at the piano and began to play. The Girl in the Other Room trades in Krall’s signature elegant ballads and jaunty bossa novas for a handful of jazz-inflected pop songs about new-found love, the scars of grief and the comforts of returning home. On this record, Krall’s polished voice is now raw with emotion.

There are cover songs, more contemporary than the ones she’s used to: Tom Waits’ mangy "Temptation," rendered coquettish and playful; Joni Mitchell’s "Black Crow"; Mose Allison’s bluesy "Stop This World." But six of the dozen numbers are from her own hand. "I’m preparing for people to say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’" she admits. Her compositions heave like colliding glaciers, with the sorrow of real life wedged into a slow four-four beat; they jump up and grind like the best of her slinky jazz; they waft across the aural landscape like the crisp autumn scents blowing from Nanaimo across the Strait of Georgia.

But you can’t stay in this melancholy place too long. Move out to the hallway, and you’ll see a wedge of light seeping through a crack in the door on the right. Walk through, and you’re in a room on Vancouver Island, where Krall is at the piano, feeling out a tune. Elvis Costello is out on the balcony sculpting lyrics that will become another song on the new record, "Abandoned Masquerade." Krall’s left hand twinkles with a large but tasteful diamond ring.

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