The Many Faces of Sara Hickman : Music: Not concerned about categories and image, the singer is following her heart and doing what she wants: folk, pop and R&B.; She plays the Coach House tonight.

The rules say that new contenders in the pop marketplace are supposed to forge a consistent, identifying sound for themselves.

Sara Hickman knows that. She just chooses not to pay any attention to it.

“It’s how I am,” the 28-year-old singer from Dallas, who plays tonight at the Coach House, said in a recent phone interview from a tour stop in Boulder, Colo.

“I’m very much influenced by everything,” said Hickman, who earned a fine arts degree in painting from North Texas State University before embarking on her recording career. “Books I read, people I talk to, movies, art. Every little nuance in my life touches me. I’ve never been a person who could make four songs sound consistently alike.”

Which is why on her second album, “Shortstop,” Hickman manages to sound like an Anita Baker-style romantic diva on one song, a winsome Joni Mitchell-type folkie on another, and, on still another, like Linda Ronstadt delivering polished folk-pop. Before the album is over, she belts out hot rhythm-and-blues as if she were Tina Turner.

The fact that Hickman excels as a singer in each guise says something about the breadth of her talent. But all that variety probably causes fits for the promotional department at her label, Elektra Records.

“In this business, I know people think (genre hopping) is very neurotic,” Hickman said. “ ‘Why can’t she just be a folk singer?’ ”

Hickman, who will play with a three-member backing band at the Coach House, said she is just trying to be herself, while honoring the fact that her self tends to have many facets.

“All the songs are real. I have a real hard time writing falsely.”

Even so, when Hickman first signed with Elektra, she dabbled in some of the image-reshaping that has been a big part of pop music since well before Brian Epstein told the Beatles to ditch black leather and wear those cute suits and ties.

“In a way, I was swayed” to make some changes in hopes of forging a salable image, she said. “They were telling me how to dress and how to cut my hair. I started looking like a New Yorker would. They brought the stylist in who works with Madonna, and she said, ‘You should cut your hair short.’ Then she plucked my eyebrows, which I never had (done) before, and I wore false eyelashes, which I’d never done. I was losing little pieces of myself.”

That was after the release of her 1989 debut album, “Equal Scary People,” which Hickman had originally recorded for a tiny Texas label before Elektra signed her and reissued it. As for her appearance nowadays, she said, “I’m pretty much me. I may look like a little rascal, but that’s how I feel comfortable. If it can work in Dallas, why not somewhere else?”

Hickman is an animated, quick-paced talker, alternately funny and impassioned, and full of anecdotes about the events underlying her slice-of-life songwriting.

“I Couldn’t Help Myself,” the swooning, Anita Baker-style song that has been on the adult-contemporary charts, came to her in a dream, she says, and her first impression was that Baker herself ought to sing it. Hickman says she decided to record it as a vocal showcase for herself, but she no longer sees its glossy pop appeal as what she wants to convey on her own albums.

“That’s how I used to write, but I’m trying to get into a more artistic vein. I wrote a song recently that I’d like to give to Bette Midler that is very much along those (lighter pop) lines. On my next album it would stick out like a sore thumb.”

Hickman’s debut album was mostly lighthearted, at times even silly. With “Shortstop,” she probes deeper. One song reflects on the career of Salvador Dali, raising questions of fame versus artistic integrity. “Aurora,” which portrays a speech-impaired stroke victim’s efforts to communicate, stems from Hickman’s experiences working with Arts For People, a Dallas organization that sponsors performers to play in hospitals.

“I go around and work with children, burn victims, AIDS patients and teen-aged psychiatric patients,” said Hickman, who has been involved in the program for four years. “It has helped me with stage presence. I feel I should always be honest and straightforward on stage. I try to be myself, show them who I am, what I’m afraid of and not afraid of.”

On “Shortstop,” Hickman’s determination to give an open account of herself led to the album’s two most unusual songs.

“In the Fields,” the forceful, dramatically undulating folk-rocker that opens the album, recalls an old lost love, from its blissful consummation to its ending following an abortion.

The song’s main theme is the unfolding of memory, rather than abortion as a political issue. Hickman’s revelation lends the song emotional weight and sets up some poignant lyrical images, in which memory becomes a creative act that must substitute (albeit in a feeble, ephemeral way) for the real-life ideal of lasting, generative love that has escaped her.

The song is addressed to the long-vanished lover she probably won’t see again:

Sometimes I carry the memory (full term)

Delivering the spitting image of you (eyes burn)

I live at peace

I did what I had to do . . .

“I think the first time I played (‘In the Fields’) on stage, I was a little worried,” Hickman said. “I’ve really come to realize it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Each person will react differently, and they should be allowed to react differently.”

“Little Blue Man,” a whimsical child’s song that ends the album, but goes unmentioned in the credits, was meant as a counterbalance to the serious “In the Fields.” Hickman sang it in a little girl’s voice, recording the song with a deliberately tinny, crackling sound, as if it were being played on a child-size box phonograph.

“I felt there was something missing from the album that was a part of me, the part that is lighthearted and silly,” she said. When she sent a tape of “Little Blue Man” to the record company’s A&R; representative, an official who acts as liaison between artist and label, “I said, ‘What do you think?’ There was a silence, and he said, ‘It’s so stupid.’ I cried and cried. Then I called him back and said, ‘It’s going on the album.’ ”

Hickman said she didn’t want to make it sound as if she is in constant turmoil with Elektra. “The amount of arguments has been pretty small. Now I think they’re seeing who I am. For a while we were dancing with one another and stepping on each other’s toes.”

After making the sleek, polished “Shortstop” with outside producer David Kershenbaum, Hickman is aiming to produce her third album herself--and to lend it a little ragged glory.

“I think (‘Shortstop’) sounds beautiful, but I like things to be electric and raw,” said Hickman, alluding to one more facet as yet unseen from her. “I think my next album will probably shock and upset people. I’m really into how Neil Young sounds. I think it will get darker and louder.”

* Sara Hickman and Cliff Eberhardt play tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $13.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.