Pop Music

Also in town this week is singer-songwriter John Hiatt, appearing Thursday at San Diego State University’s Backdoor.

Hiatt’s songs have been covered by the late Ricky Nelson, Dave Edmunds, the Searchers, Three Dog Night and others. But his solo career--as sort of a new wave folk-rocker--has been only marginally successful, despite critical raves for albums like 1979’s “Slug Line” and 1982’s “All of a Sudden.”

Opening the show for Hiatt will be San Diego’s own Cindy Lee Berryhill, whose debut album of original folk-rock songs “with too many verses,” as she describes them, was released last October by Rhino Records.

From the time she composed her first song, a wordy tribute to dinosaurs when she was 10 years old and growing up in rural Ramona, Berryhill has never been content with writing simple love ballads.

Among the quirkier songs on her Rhino debut, “Who’s Gonna Save the World?”, are “Steve on H,” about a friend hooked on heroin, and the whimsical “Damn, Wish I Was a Man.”

Noting that Berryhill’s songs “are personal, political, funny and feminist,” a reviewer for L.A. Weekly in Los Angeles recently wrote that Berryhill reminds him of Dolly Parton crossed with Patti Smith, “sometimes of a skinned-knee, muddied-up Susan Vega, and occasionally, in her story-telling mode, of a female Peter Case.”