Taking Her Career on Faith : For Now, Becker Is Comfortable Within Christian Music Confines

Margaret Becker has an expansive, soul-inflected voice, but because she applies it to the field of Christian pop, she sometimes finds her thematic options narrowed.

Becker’s four albums are filled with spiritual love songs to God. But sometimes, the singer said in a recent phone interview, she also writes about plain old person-to-person romance. Instead of recording them herself, Becker has begun to pitch those love songs to singers working in the pop mainstream, who don’t have to deal with some of the strictures she finds in the world of Christian music.

“I write a lot of stuff like that, but they would not be successful songs in the Christian arena,” Becker said. The problem, she continued, isn’t that Christian audiences don’t like a good romantic love song; it’s that they don’t want to hear one coming from an unmarried woman like herself.

“They’re a little scared if a single person sings a love song. They can accept it from a married person. In fact, they adore it. But, if it’s a single woman, they don’t accept it.”

It’s a limitation that Becker, 32, has been able to accept. She says she is not straining to leap onto a secular label, as Amy Grant has done with great pop success, and as Sam Phillips has done to alternative-rock acclaim.

But Becker does take hope that Grant’s romantic songs and videos (in which she cavorts for the camera with an actor, rather than her own husband) may be broadening what’s permissible for women in Christian pop.

“It’s opening new doors,” said Becker, who headlines a concert tonight at Rose Drive Friends Church in Yorba Linda (also appearing are former Orange County rocker Rick Elias and current Orange County resident Peter Shambrook, who have been opening for Becker on her current tour).

Grant “has been a spokesperson for the industry, and she has butted heads with a lot of people,” Becker said. “The Christian (music) culture fought her tooth and nail every step of the way. Her success helps everybody relax and go, ‘This is life, we don’t live in the 1800s.’ People should realize she’s a woman and an artist, and there are lots of different expressions under God’s sun that we can’t eliminate.”

Becker emerged as a headliner on the Christian pop circuit last year, with the release of her “Simple House” album, after working her way up as an opening act for such performers as Petra and Michael W. Smith.

She tries to look toward the larger secular pop world with clear-eyed pragmatism. “It’s not my ultimate goal, but if the doors naturally opened, I’d want to go through and experiment with it,” she said. “I haven’t even conquered this (Christian music) industry, so it would be real presumptuous to say I’m going to blow the doors off in another industry.

‘As we progress over the next couple of years, it’ll be evident if we have a reason to be there. I’ve always been real methodical about my career.”

Actually, Becker said, it goes against her nature to be in the spotlight. Her ambition as a teen-ager in East Islip, N.Y., was to work behind the scenes as a session singer.

“I’m not exactly thrilled to be a front person. There’s so much responsibility and a lot of demands that a session person doesn’t have. I wanted to be very anonymous. I didn’t set my sights on being this huge singer. I just wanted to make a great living singing.”

Singing commercial jingles for a living would be nice, Becker thought at the time. She had no notion of singing about matters of faith.

“I was raised Catholic, in a working-class family where attending church on Sunday is fine, but anything more is a little weird.”

At 18, Becker went off to study music at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. She got a job on the side busing dishes. There, she befriended a woman who introduced her to “born-again” faith.

“She led this baffling life. She was always in control and had a sense of direction and peace, even in the most stressful circumstances. Watching her month after month, I became intrigued. She didn’t lay the church thing on me, which was good, because I probably would have freaked out. She just put a Bible in my hand, and I went from there.”

Becker started writing songs about her deepening faith, and singing them in Christian coffeehouses in New York. In 1985, she came to Nashville, a hub of the Christian music business, and landed a deal with Sparrow Records. When she emerged in 1987, she was belting out pop-metal songs along the lines of Heart or Patty Smythe.

“In the beginning I was very unsure of myself, and I was less vocal about the direction and the material that was chosen. As I went on I became a lot more aware of my liberty to push the albums in a certain direction.”

The direction she chose on her 1989 album, “Immigrant’s Daughter,” and on last year’s “Simple House” pushed her more toward R & B and soul influences she had been absorbing from childhood.

Echoes of the Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox and the Supremes are evident, but Becker also ranges, on “I Will Not Lay Down,” toward a Peter Gabriel production feel, with African rhythms and vocals reminiscent of such big-voiced alternative-rock singers as Toni Childs and Shawn Colvin.

Rather than simply affirming faith in jubilant terms, her songs often depict a note of searching and yearning for spiritual connection.

“I’ve always been a tumultuous sort of individual, and I’m not happy being serene,” Becker said. “Though I’m riddled at times with self-doubt, there is a refuge, a relationship of approval (that comes from God) in spite of that.”

Becker said she doesn’t feel comfortable being perceived as carrying on a musical ministry. “When you put it in that light, it becomes open to all sorts of weird criticism. I’m just a writer, commenting on my life, and the aspect of faith in it is an all-consuming thing.”

Becker’s tumultuous side surfaced in 1988, when she was living in in Nashville and trying to write songs for her second album.

“Every time I sat down to write,” she said, “I’d get distracted by the radio or television, or what was on my walls. I needed a change of environment, but I was penniless at the time and couldn’t afford to go to Aruba.” Her solution was to deposit her television, radio, and most of her household furnishings on the sidewalk outside her apartment, and to invite a neighborhood kid to take it all.

“Creatively speaking, it opened up a whole new window for me. When I eliminated all the nuisances, it was a great time of growth.”

In her notes to the “Simple House” album, Becker wrote that giving up most of her possessions showed that “I could live a very full life with just a few basics.”

“Just for the record, I don’t advocate it for anyone,” she said. “It was just me, being extreme.” After about 2 1/2 years of no-frills living, she acquired a house “on a hillside, with a real inspirational view,” and furnished it “with everything I had before.” Housing others remains a concern for Becker: She said that she and Sparrow Records are donating 55 cents from each sale of “Simple House” to Habitat for Humanity, a charity that helps poor people build homes.

* Margaret Becker, Rick Elias and Peter Shambrook play tonight at 8 at Rose Dive Friends Church, 4221 Rose Drive, Yorba Linda. Tickets: $11.50. Information: (714) 528-6496.