Gail Ann Dorsey: The Comparison Test

Pop observers here are having trouble deciding whether singer-songwriter Gail Ann Dorsey is the new Tracy Chapman or the new Terence Trent D’Arby.

Like Chapman, the female pop sensation of 1988, Dorsey is a soft-spoken woman who sings about politics and romance with a thoughtful, embracing edge. But like D’Arby, perhaps last year’s flashiest pop arrival, Dorsey is an American expatriate who mixes rock and soul influences in her music.

There are moments on Dorsey’s debut album--”The Corporate World,” which was just released in the United States by Warner Bros.--when both comparisons make sense.

The ecology-minded “Wasted Country,” the opening number, may feature harder rock textures than Chapman’s folk-flavored compositions, but there is a shared sense of anger over indifference and greed.

Sample lines:

Mary can’t go out and play

‘Cause what they found

In the schoolyard today.

... Wasted country

Oh, what have you left for me? At the same time, Dorsey, 26, exhibits enough vocal authority and occasional songwriting audacity to remind you of D’Arby’s boldness. She also combines rock and soul strains so well that it’s not surprising to see a local rock journal suggest that Dorsey’s “Where Is Your Love?” sounds like the Supremes doing a soul version of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

Sample lines:

We got pills for sickness

We got powders for health

We got famine land

Next to the tree of wealth

... But where is your love?

Can you find it? Dorsey smiled during an interview here last week when the Chapman and D’Arby comparisons were mentioned.

“I guess I have been compared a little to just about everything,” said Dorsey, a Philadelphian who spent 18 months studying film at CalArts in Valencia before moving to London in 1983.

“People seem to find it difficult to pin my style down, which probably isn’t real positive from a marketing view, but I like being a little elusive. I call it soul music with a rock flavor. I love guitars. Hendrix, Terry Kath (of Chicago), Nancy Wilson (of Heart) were all big influences. But so were Marvin Gaye and Joni Mitchell, the B-52’s and Beethoven. I just tend to put a little of everything in my music.”

Dorsey, who is from a working-class background, spent a year in New York after deciding at CalArts to switch from film to music. But she didn’t begin to blossom as a musician until moving here.

The petite woman, who had played bass in various integrated rock bands in Philadelphia in her teens, found lots of opportunity in the thriving London music scene. She played in jazz and rock clubs and eventually did session work and/or toured with such acts as Boy George, the Kane Gang and the Thrashing Doves.

Record companies, however, didn’t begin pursuing her until they learned that she also sang and wrote. The debut album, which features Eric Clapton’s guitar work on “Wasted Country,” received generally glowing reviews when released here in October, but sales were modest.

Dorsey, who hopes to do some live dates with a five-piece band this fall in the United States, is already thinking of the next album.

“I’ll try to make the music a bit funkier and a bit rawer on the next album,” she said.

“I read a lot of reviews that said this record was ‘perfect pop’ and I had no intention for it to be pop, so I may have done something wrong there.”

At the same time, she may make the social commentary a little more “subtle.”

“I don’t think music or anything else can change people who don’t want to change and I don’t want to preach to people, but artists--whether in books or records or films--have to deal with things that are important to them, and what’s happening in society is obviously something that lots of artists find important.

“The reason the album is called ‘The Corporate World’ is that I think there is so much materialism in the world today . . . the whole yuppie ideal of getting ahead in business and having your own car phone. That’s the new role model.

“One of the things about rock that first excited me was that it represented freedom and the chance to be your own person--to break away from the corporate identity. But that doesn’t seem to be the goal anymore. Rather than be Mick Jagger, a lot of kids want to run Exxon.”

LIVE ACTION: Neil Diamond has added a 10th Forum show for July 2. Tickets go on sale Monday. . . . Great White and Tesla will be at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on July 8, while Love and Rockets will be there July 21. . . . Jackson Browne opens a three-night stand Aug. 11 at the Universal Amphitheatre. . . . Merle Haggard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Glen Campbell will headline a Fourth of July weekend country package July 1 and 2 at Whittier Narrows Park. . . . Bonnie Raitt and Richard Thompson will be at the Santa Barbara County Bowl on June 25, with Elvis Costello scheduled there Sept. 10. . . . Al Jarreau will be at the Pacific Amphitheatre on July 1 with Take 6. . . . The Pat Metheny Group headlines the Wiltern Theatre on July 26, while Janis Ian and John Stewart are due July 8 at Bogart’s.