POP MUSIC REVIEW : Kathy Mattea Soars Off the Record

While Kathy Mattea’s albums are fairly splendid, they offer only a flat sketch of the warmth and emotion that went into her Monday show at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana.

Case in point: her rendition of “Come From the Heart.” The lyric deals with the battle between love and fear: “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.”

On her current “Willow in the Wind” album, hampered by a Nashville studio gloss, the song doesn’t sound as if it’s coming from anywhere near the heart. On stage, though, the performance blossomed into a real-time embodiment of its message, with Mattea’s expressive voice soaring through the song.

If k.d. lang’s voice is like a thunderstorm in its overwhelming emotion, Mattea’s is more of a pleasant afternoon. But though it doesn’t shatter glass, Mattea’s moderately powered, deeply shaded voice makes her songs quiver.

Mattea has written only one song that she performs, “Leaving West Virginia,” and her aching version of it Monday suggests she should rely more heavily on her own muse. But she is also fully capable of inhabiting other writers’ songs. Her 1986 hit of Nanci Griffith’s “Love at the Five and Dime” conveyed every bump of a couple’s rocky road to lasting love.

In the 20-song show her voice illuminated a variety of emotional scenarios, from the unbridled romance of “Goin’ Gone” to a broken home in “Life as We Knew It” to the plight of the homeless in “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 her high-powered vocal recalled an early Linda Ronstadt.