POP MUSIC REVIEW : Country-Folk-Rock Singer Carpenter: Don’t Call Her Karen : Fresh from an engagement at the Roxy, she brings her intimate, melancholy style to the Bandstand in Anaheim on Sunday night.

Early in her show at the Roxy on Thursday night, Mary-Chapin Carpenter told an odd little story about being chased down a backstage hallway recently by a confused woman inquiring “Karen? Karen?”

This D.C.-bred country-folk-rock singer, who is doing a free show at the Bandstand in Anaheim on Sunday night, is more likely to be confused with Rosanne Cash, for whom she’s sometimes a ringer, than with Karen Carpenter.

Her “Shooting Straight in the Dark” LP isn’t quite as nakedly confessional as Cash’s current “Interiors,” but it’s not much less vulnerable.

To be thirtysomething and single-something is to recognize too many intimate details in her often melancholic, always strong writing.

Like Cash, again, Carpenter is destined to be remembered more for her songwriting than her performing, which is naturally limited by the downbeat nature of much of the material--though, toward the set’s end at the Roxy, she put her acoustic guitar down and let the rather polite backup band carry her through such stomps as NRBQ’s sprightly rocker “If I Don’t Have You” and her own two-stepper “How Do.”

Carpenter rarely comes off as a doormat in her pointed songs about losing in love. At times, however, you might wish she could work up a little more bile. In one unrecorded song, she did just that: “Opening Act” was a hilarious diatribe directed at a country headliner, unnamed except for a two-syllable profanity.

“I’m not goin’ bald, so I don’t wear a hat,” she sang in her own defense. “I don’t wear tight jeans; I’m a little too fat.”

Nope, this isn’t Karen.

Mary-Chapin Carpenter sings Sunday at 6 p.m. at the Bandstand, 1721 S. Manchester Ave., Anaheim. Admission: free, courtesy of radio station KZLA and the Bootbarn in Anaheim. Information: (714) 956-1410.