POP MUSIC REVIEW : Kathy Mattea’s Best Comes Live From the Heart, Not From Studio

Kathy Mattea’s heated performance Monday evening at the Crazy Horse Steak House and Saloon was an excellent advertisement for the virtues of live music. While she’s fairly splendid on record--enough so to have been named female vocalist of the year by the Country Music Assn. last fall--Mattea’s albums offer only a flat sketch of the warmth and emotion that go into her show.

The strongest case in point Monday was her rendition of “Come From the Heart” off her current album, “Willow in the Wind.” The song’s lyric deals with the pervasive human battle between love and fear, stressing: “You’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money/Love like you’ll never get hurt./You’ve got to dance like nobody’s watching,/It’s got to come from the heart if you want it to work.”

The problem on the record is that the song is so hampered by Nashville studio gloss that it doesn’t sound like it is coming from an organ anywhere near the heart. On the stage, though, the performance blossomed into a real-time embodiment of its message, with Mattea’s expressive voice soaring through.

If k.d. lang’s voice is like a full-fledged thunderstorm in its overwhelming emotion, Mattea’s is more of a pleasant afternoon. It doesn’t shatter glass, but Mattea’s moderately powered, deeply shaded voice makes her songs quiver with life.

Mattea has written just one song that she performs, “Leaving West Virginia,” and her aching version of it Monday suggests that she should rely more heavily on her own muse.

But she is fully capable of inhabiting other writer’s songs. Her rendition of Nanci Griffiths’ “Love at the Five and Dime” conveyed every bump of a couple’s rocky road to lasting love.

Mattea’s recent hit, “Where’ve You Been?”--by Mattea’s husband, Jon Vezner, and Don Henry--is based on Vezner’s grandparents, who after 60 years together wound up on separate floors of a hospital. The tale of their reunification could easily have veered into being a mawkishly oversentimental greeting card, but Mattea’s evocative vocal fleshed out the three-minute song in such a way that it conveyed a tear-inducing reality that many a novelist would be hard pressed to achieve.

A polar opposite to that song was “Harley,” a wickedly humorous tune about the adventures of a biker baby. Through the 20-song show, Mattea’s voice illuminated varied emotional scenarios, from the unbridled romanticism of “Goin’ Gone” to the broken home in “Life as We Knew It” to the plight of the homeless in the as-yet-unrecorded “Quarter Moon.”

The set also included a Western swing number, a version of Bobby Womack’s “It’s All Over Now,” and an a cappella logging song, on which Mattea’s high-powered vocal recalled early Linda Ronstadt.

A good amount of the credit for Mattea’s on-stage depth must go to her excellent six-piece band. Guitarist Bill Cooley and violin-mandolin-acoustic guitar triple-threat Jonathan Yudkin particularly lent empathetic responses to Mattea’s varying vocal moods.