For Ketchum, Country Music Was Siren’s Song : Pop music: Singer’s ambiguous ‘Someplace Far Away’ mirrors the marriage he lost after his own life-changing decision.

Hal Ketchum’s latest album, “Sure Love,” ends with a song about a restless soul in the Old West--a man who sees a newspaper account about wagons heading for gold country and catches the prospecting fever on the spot.

Ketchum’s song “Someplace Far Away” is ambiguous as to whether the man follows through on his dream. He is married to a woman who “didn’t want to be no . . . prospector’s wife.” Will he be able to persuade her to join him in lighting out for the Territories? Or will he remain settled and allow the dream to fade?

At the song’s end, the newspaper that fueled the domestic commotion winds up in the family’s stove--and it’s up to the listener to decide whether that symbolizes the man’s dreams turning to ash, or the woman’s marriage going up in smoke because her husband has decided to answer a call that she can’t hear.

Don’t expect Ketchum to settle the matter for you. “Who knows? I’m not sure what the resolution is myself,” he said over the phone from his home in Nashville.

In his own life, the 40-year-old country singer had to resolve a very similar conflict.

Ten years ago, Ketchum was a carpenter and cabinetmaker with a solid, settled life, running his own shop in Gruene, Tex., married and raising two children while playing a little music on the side.

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There was no sudden, transforming call that led him to abandon 2-by-4s for footlights, but, by 1990, Ketchum faced a choice between staying settled in Texas and pursuing his musical dreams in Nashville. He chose the dream, and his marriage ended.

Ketchum said that his wife wanted stability, like the woman in “Someplace Far Away”--”and quite rightly so. But I was enthralled with being on stage and singing my own songs. I didn’t know anything about the music business, and it was difficult to reassure somebody else about something I didn’t understand.”

Ketchum, who appears tonight on “The Tonight Show,” struck gold with “Past the Point of Rescue,” the 1991 album that he says has now sold more than 900,000 copies. “Sure Love,” released last year, remains on the country charts and has sold more than 400,000 copies.

Both records fit into the current trend of country albums that echo the 1970s Southern California rock sound epitomized by the Eagles: clean, well-played productions that combine rock, country and folk strains with a sensitive, often introspective songwriting slant.

Ketchum grew up in Greenwich, N.Y., a small town in the Adirondack Mountains, near the Vermont border. His father liked the Buck Owens/Merle Haggard brand of rockin’ country music that came out of Bakersfield; his mother favored such crooners as Sinatra.

“Music was a very important part of the mood of the household,” he recalled. “I was always encouraged in it.”

Ketchum got a set of drums when he was 12 and began playing along to hard-rock records. At 15, he was playing professionally in an R & B band. “I always had bands, but I did not intend to make it in the music business,” he said.

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Carpentry and woodworking were his living. As he headed into his 30s, “I had a cabinet shop and a nice little house on the river in Gruene, Tex. (outside of Austin), and things were going my way,” Ketchum said.

Gruene also had a club where the cream of the fertile Austin music scene--Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Lyle Lovett, Jerry Jeff Walker, Townes Van Zandt and others--would appear. Ketchum became a regular and caught the bug.

“After two or three months of being influenced by that, I jumped in,” he said. “That was my school.”

By the late 1980s, Ketchum had released an album, “Threadbare Alibis,” on a small, Austin independent label, Watermelon Records. He toured as a solo-acoustic opening act for Jerry Jeff Walker. Then Ketchum decided that Nashville was the place to take his dreams a step further.