Shawn Colvin Does Some Sole-Searching

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO â€”  If Sartre was right and hell is other people, Shawn Colvin’s self-involved show Tuesday night at the Coach House should have been little short of heavenly.

Colvin’s acoustic concert was as solo as solo can be. In terms of performance, that wasn’t bad at all: This talented folk-pop singer managed quite well with a crystalline voice, a gift for melody, and the ability to accompany herself on guitar with energy and flair.

But in terms of songwriting, she too often falls into solipsism. There’s nobody in there but herself.

Her two albums, “Steady On� (which won a Grammy two years ago for Best Contemporary Folk Recording) and the recent “Fat City� are stocked mainly with ruminations in which she rakes over the embers of often-harsh romantic experience and tries to find some fortifying meaning in what she’s been through.

There’s no knocking a songwriter’s thoughtful search for meaning. Colvin’s problem is that, in cutting to the emotional core of an experience, she usually neglects to make vivid the experience itself. Yes, we come to appreciate, and perhaps identify with, her feelings about what she’s been through. But her songs would be far more involving if she’d give us a better idea of just what it is she has been through.

e absence of dialogue, incident, detail, dramatic action, worldly observation and, above all, character development in most of Colvin’s songs left a hollow center in a 100-minute show that had plenty of surface allure.

Colvin came off as a woman of feeling who can convey feelings that are fundamental. But feelings arise from our contact with others, and the others in Colvin’s songs (usually lovers in relationships failed or, less frequently, hopeful) are given no words, no traits, virtually no identities. They aren’t recognizable people; they exist only by implication. They’re barely pronouns, invisible adjuncts to Colvin’s dominating “I.�

Like most folkies whose material is unrelievedly earnest, Colvin has learned to leaven her shows with wry, amiable chat. But while she indeed was wry and amiable, her chat was about nothing very interesting, and about nothing but herself.

She talked airily about what a dull disappointment the Clinton inaugural, where she performed at one of the balls, turned out to be for her. And she pulled out a thick sheaf of computer printouts that someone in the house had give her, full of doting messages transmitted among a network of fans interconnected by modems. It could have been fun if those notes had sassed Colvin a little. But her lengthy session with the printouts merely proved that Sartre had it wrong: Hell, in fact, is listening to other people’s slavishly admiring fan mail--unless you happen to be a slavishly admiring fan, as most of the 400 or so people in the house obviously were.

It was telling that, after Colvin let it slip that she is engaged to be married, the round of questions from the crowd concerned what she is going to wear at the wedding, what music she wants to have played--everything but questions about whom she is marrying. That would have involved introducing an important character other than Colvin herself, and we couldn’t have that, could we?

“Fat City,� with its more deeply probing material, is an improvement over “Steady On� which featured some memorable melodies saddled with one-dimensional lyrics and generically gleaming contemporary-folk production. Colvin did hint, in her better moments, at a less solipsistic songwriting self that would like to engage the world around her but hasn’t quite found the means.

“Tennessee� (not the acclaimed rap hit by Arrested Development) depicts a Yankee songwriter (Colvin grew up in South Dakota and Illinois and is based in New York City) seeking vibrancy in Southern roots-rock, but it also acknowledges some friction in the encounter between Southern sensibilities and her own. Colvin brought out the song’s combination of zest and tension with muscular bass-note momentum on guitar and with Bonnie Raitt-style husky-bluesy touches that offset her normally airy, clear voice.

“Polaroids,� her best-developed lyric, does manage to wrap some narrative flesh around the emotional bones of a dashed love affair. “Round of Blues,� a fetching tune that wouldn’t be unworthy of Colvin’s key influence, Joni Mitchell, evokes a woman’s emotional high-wire walk as she pursues a relationship that’s both promising and fraught with the danger of rejection.

She encored strongly with three songs about her own enterprise as an artist. “The Dead of the Night� is a lustrous, yearning if lyrically overheated song depicting musical creation as a sacrament (in concert, the luster and yearning prevailed). “Ricochet in Time� is a standard-issue wistful lament about the impermanence of life lived on the road. “I Don’t Know Why� was a fine show-closer, with its confession of bewilderment and its sad affirmation: “If there were no music, I would not get through.�

Rarely has a very good song been mangled as badly as “I Don’t Know Why� is on “Fat City,� where Colvin turns it into a bloated, over-sung production number. Live, her simple, eloquent rendition redeemed the slow ballad in full.

But Colvin’s fans should check out the definitive, up-tempo bluegrass version of “I Don’t Know Why� by the wonderful Alison Krauss & Union Station on their album, “Every Time You Say Goodbye.� For its 36-year-old author, “I Don’t Know Why� is a weary account of blows absorbed and endured; Krauss, 21, transforms it into a celebration of her quest for new awareness, knowing full well that new experience can also bring new pain and new bewilderment. It would be good if Colvin could tap more deeply into a similar zest for exploring the world outside herself and, Sartre notwithstanding, take a closer look at what goes on with other people. C’mon, Shawn, give ‘em hell.

Richard Stekol, one of the classy veterans of the Orange County rock scene, opened with a solo set that displayed impressive strengths and a few limitations.

He is an above-average electric guitarist but in this acoustic show he stuck to basic, unadorned strumming. His voice isn’t commanding, but it is warm and well suited to the meditative songs that made up his 45-minute set.

Some of those songs meandered, as Stekol overindulged his penchant for wordsmithing. But his good ones are top-notch, including a new song, “This Is Not Heaven.� He paired it in a medley with the Marvin Gaye/Tammy Terrell duet oldie “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing,� contrasting the cover’s dreamy idyll with his own notion that every sweetness is limned with sorrow.

A veteran of the ‘70s rock bands Honk and Funky Kings, Stekol released his first solo album in 1991, and he finished his set with two of its best songs. “Coloured Water� is an intimate, finely etched reverie in which Stekol imagines distilling love’s essence like liquid in a crystal decanter. “America Walking By� is a perfect song about the public and private grief attending the death of a young man. In the right country star’s hands, this exquisite ballad could drain tear ducts from coast to coast, and do it with utmost honesty and grace.

Stekol was introduced as a “Geffen Records recording artist,� a title that’s a little premature. Geffen actually has given him money to record only on a tryout basis. The music industry’s odds are stacked against such graybeards as Stekol (a graybeard literally as well as figuratively). But as that cover tune said, there ain’t nothing like the real thing.