HIATT TIME FOR A CHANGE : This Rocker Journeyed Inward and Came Out a Winner

“I’m the kinda fella needs a second chance,” John Hiatt sings in the title song of his latest album, “Stolen Moments.”

It’s not a plea for mercy, but a happy, forthright declaration. Hiatt desperately needed a dispensation a few years ago, and life handed it to him, for reasons the veteran rocker doesn’t claim to comprehend.

Stories of decline and redemption, of second chances seized, are always gratifying. But the way in which Hiatt, 37, has puzzled out the arc of his life over the course of his three most recent albums has been special.

Hiatt’s tools were always impressive. His knack for the sharp lyrical phrase and the catchy melodic hook earned him considerable respect in the songwriters’ guild. Elvis Costello has lavished praise on Hiatt and recorded a duet with him, and tunesmiths as accomplished as Bob Dylan, Rodney Crowell and John Doe have covered his songs. More recently, Bonnie Raitt, with “Thing Called Love,” and Jeff Healey, with “Angel Eyes,” have had big hits with Hiatt songs.

The new wrinkle that Hiatt introduced, starting with “Bring the Family” in 1987, and continuing with 1988’s “Slow Turning” and now “Stolen Moments,” was a fresh subject: himself.

Speaking over the phone recently from his home in Nashville, Hiatt said it’s a subject that he tried for many years to avoid.

“It seems like I spent a lot of time prior to these last three records not willing to do that at all,” he said of his turn toward autobiographical song writing. “I didn’t want to look at myself, and I didn’t want you to look at me, either. I hit a point where I needed to check out just who the hell I was, period.”

Hiatt’s 1985 album “Warming Up to the Ice Age” told a great deal about the state he was in then. Songs like “The Usual” (the one Dylan recorded a few years ago for a movie soundtrack) described a desperate character so used to dosing himself with booze that the bartender doesn’t even have to ask him to name his drink--he’ll have the usual.

“Zero House” was a harrowing curse of a breakup song that wallowed in spite and self-loathing as Hiatt assessed a shattered relationship, concluding that it had never amounted to anything in the first place: “Nobody lived here, no woman, no man. Just a couple of flies, circling a garbage can.”

Before the spiral ended, Hiatt’s wife had committed suicide. But the spiral, and his drinking and drug abuse, did end.

“I don’t know why some people wake up and go, ‘Oh,’ and other people go all the way to the grave,” Hiatt said. “Divine intervention. Certainly nothing that I earned. Anyway, that was then and this is now.”

Far from letting the past go, though, Hiatt has explored it over his troika of post-recovery albums.

There’s a sense of the past being pieced together, considered, and examined for its present implications.

At times, Hiatt raises the fear that the worst of his past might still lurk about, threatening to reassert itself. “It’ll Come to You,” from “Slow Turning,” comes wrapped in a humorous, gruff R & B package that’s akin to Randy Newman’s style. But the chill is there:

Now you’re happily married with a wife and kids of your own,

But sometimes in the closet at night you can hear them rattlin’ bones

Takin’ bets on on your future and your current postal zone.

It’s a spooky equation, but check yourself out, Jack,

You’re the great unknown.

With his new album, though, Hiatt sees a way to use the past constructively, as an inspiration, rather than as a hovering threat.

“Listening to Old Voices,” a lovely elegy that sounds like an up-to-date reunion between Bob Dylan and the Band, is sung from the perspective of a maturing artist who trusts in his increasing ability to understand what’s gone before.

Now is it true we are possessed by the ones we leave behind,

Or is it by them we are inspired?

It’s a new light, new day, listening for the meaning, learning how to say

It’ s a new place, but you’ve always been here

You’re just listening to old voices with a new ear.

“The past is always there until you deal with it,” Hiatt said. “I think your actions in the past can very much and very easily come back to haunt you, that what you resist persists. If you’re running from something, you better believe it can catch you. Once you make peace with it, you can draw strength from it.”

Often, past and present overlap in Hiatt’s songs. Memories of childhood give way to observations about a more hopeful present in which he strives to fulfill the responsibilities of being a husband and a parent (Hiatt is married again, to a woman who inspires him to write fervent love songs. They have a 12-year-old son and two daughters, ages 6 and 2).

Judging from the affirmative, sometimes ebullient tone of songs such as “Real Fine Love,” “The Rest of the Dream,” and “One Kiss,” the warmth of the hearth has taken booze’s place as Hiatt’s tonic. But Hiatt also isn’t afraid to confront the chill that lingers in his memory.

In “Seven Little Indians,” Hiatt recalls how his own father would get swept up in telling fanciful stories he made up for his seven offspring. The ghostly, atmospheric song (a departure from Hiatt’s usual array of roots-conscious styles that range assuredly through rockabilly, country and R & B sources) describes Hiatt’s father trying to weave an imaginary life better than the precarious reality that envelopes the household.

And though everything always worked out for the better in all of his stories,

In that little brick house it always felt like something was moving in for the kill.

The narrative goes on to tell, tersely and movingly, how that dread something really did move into Hiatt’s home in Indianapolis: His oldest brother died when Hiatt was 9, his father when he was 11. But the song ends with a new cycle of hope as Hiatt pictures himself spinning stories with happy endings for his own kids.

“They were always great adventures, and they were always about us,” Hiatt said, recalling his father’s tales. “Even when he didn’t give (the characters) our names, you knew they were really about us. They were about his wishes and hopes for us.”

By his mid-teens, Hiatt had decided that his best hope lay with his songs and his guitar.

“I’d been playing little coffee house places,” he recalled. “I’d sneak down to Bloomington and play at (Indiana University). In between poetry readings, where there’d be guys describing breasts as ‘ripe melons,’ I’d sing my songs. That was encouraging, at 15 or 16, that these bohemian college people would think I had something. It was a charge.”

Hiatt quit high school at 16 and spent a year hauling boxes of papers and office supplies for an insurance company, with an eye toward moving to Nashville to make his way in the music business. He made the move at 18 and got a $25-a-week job writing songs for one of the big Nashville publishing companies. Hiatt’s first success, “Sure as I’m Sittin’ Here,” was a No. 16 pop hit for Three Dog Night in 1974. The door opened for a recording career of his own. It led to a cult hero’s career, not a star’s, as Hiatt moved from label to label--Epic, then MCA, then Geffen--without a commercial breakthrough.

In 1986, with his personal life becoming more stable, Hiatt lost his record deal.

“I certainly entertained thoughts of giving up the recording end of things when Geffen cut me loose,” he said. “I thought it was only prudent at that juncture, to paraphrase my buddy George Bush. Maybe (the music business) didn’t want me to make any more records. Or maybe they weren’t going to let me.”

Hiatt kept supporting himself with live shows until the British label, Demon Records, put him back on a recording tack. “They said, ‘We like what you do. If you want to sing in the shower, we’ll put that out.’ ”

The record Hiatt made, “Bring the Family,” was nearly as basic as that. It was direct and unpretentious, with a wonderfully spontaneous feeling provided by an all-star band composed of guitarist Ry Cooder and bassist Nick Lowe (both of whom had worked with Hiatt on previous projects) and drummer Jim Keltner. It landed Hiatt an American deal with his current label, A & M, and it introduced the themes of recovery, reflection, and celebration of love of wife and children that have made him perhaps the most eloquent family man in pop. The juxtaposition of the ghost-ridden household of his youth with the secure nest he wants to build as an adult takes Hiatt’s songs of family life far beyond the platitude-filled “Daddy’s Hands” ilk that are one of the old standbys of country music.

“Families can get cut off somehow from the rest of the world and get caught up in their own webs. That happened with our family from time to time,” Hiatt said of his childhood home. “On the other hand, if you can harness the family’s energy, which is about as great as a big ‘ol American V-8 engine, that sucker will take you to the moon and back.”

For all that power, which comes through in the ringing anthem to parenthood, “The Rest of the Dream,” Hiatt says he is caught in the press between work and family that squeezes most American adults.

“Hell, we live in a country where the family is stretched by what’s important in our country today--making a buck,” Hiatt said. “I don’t know anybody my age who doesn’t struggle with the issues of career versus family, regardless of what career they’re in. You can’t hang it on the music business. I draw a lot of strength from the family unit, and I’m interested in keeping that a priority. I’m also a human being. It’s a tough road to walk these days. I do it badly some days, and mo’ better some other days.”

When he talks about his current outlook, Hiatt’s accent is on the mo’ better. He joked about the unaccustomed “thin air” he’s been breathing now that “Stolen Moments” has moved into the 60s on the Billboard top pop albums chart--hardly a rarefied position for most hit-generating acts, but a career best for cult-figure Hiatt.

“With this album in particular, we’ve picked up a younger audience,” Hiatt said. “I don’t mean kids who would go see Whitesnake but more college age kids. At one point it was the number two most added (record) on the alternative charts, right behind Sonic Youth--which is where I want to be. I’m sitting there, scratching my head: ‘What do I have to say to this age group?’ But I realize I’ve got plenty to say.”

The overwhelming tenor of what he says is going to be positive, said Hiatt, who closes his current album with a vision of a spry, loving old age with his wife that’s straight out of that famous 19th-Century vision of Robert Browning: “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be/The last of life, for which the first was made.”

“I’m interested in reverberating and happening. I’m not into bitching and moaning,” said the guy who five years ago was comparing himself to a fly buzzing through garbage. “I feel younger and much more enthusiastic now than in my 20s. I enjoy the idea of growing old. I think the best is yet to come. That’s been my experience in life.”

Who

John Hiatt with the Brothers Figaro.

When

Saturday, Sept. 15, at 8 and 10:30 p.m. The early show is sold out.

Where

Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

Whereabouts

5 Freeway to San Juan Creek Road; turn left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is on the right, in the Esplanade.

Wherewithal

$19.50.

Where to call

(714) 496-8930.