A Leap Back to His Past : Music: With his latest album, Kenny Loggins feels he is himself again. The singer-songwriter performs Monday in San Diego.

As half of the 1970s pop-acoustic duo Loggins and Messina, and later as a major solo artist, Kenny Loggins has straddled career peaks that only a few fortunate souls ever glimpse. For most of his adult life, Loggins’ world has been delineated by hit albums; sold-out concerts; a large, loyal following; financial security, and, not least, the respect of fellow musicians for songwriting and performance skills that have produced memorable work.

But, like many pop artists who have crossed over to the back side of 40, Loggins these days spends more time thinking about his place in music and, conversely, its place in his life.

Reinvigorated by a process of redefining himself, his art and even his approach to concertizing, Loggins visits San Diego on Monday night for a show at the Embarcadero Marina Park South, site of the SummerPops series.

Loggins’ probing self-reflection began in earnest in 1989, when he confronted a personal and musical crucible. Unhappy both with the direction of his career and with a 13-year marriage that had grown distant and adversarial, Loggins spent several nights sitting in his bathroom, composing his spiritual liberation, a song called “Leap of Faith.”

The song opened a floodgate of confessional, frequently poignant odes that crystallized and illuminated a complex web of disappointments, yearnings, cold facts and resolutions. While writing “The Real Thing” for his daughter’s christening, Loggins was surprised to find himself explaining in lyrics why he and the girl’s mother had to end their marriage--before such a thing had even been discussed.

Admittedly floored by an epiphany that had risen from his subconscious, Loggins extended the experience to a re-examination of his life and music. Finding affirmation in dissolution, he radically altered both. He divorced, fell in love with Santa Barbara nutritionist Julie Cooper (they married in July) and retooled his muse.

In a phone interview earlier this week from his home in Santa Barbara, Loggins candidly discussed how the “Leap of Faith” album’s naked emotions have proven an instrument of substantive change--and not only for him.

“I was just chronicling the movement that was taking place in my own life,” Loggins said in a soft, pleasant voice. “When I look back and see the full range of change that took place during the making of that album, I realize it’s a real state of grace for me to be able to write about all that. I think, in the long run, people have gotten strength from songs like ‘Leap of Faith’ and ‘I Would Do Anything.’ It’s been a healing experience not only for me but for others as well.”

If Loggins couldn’t have predicted the album’s subject matter, he knew it would sound different from his last several releases. Throughout the ‘80s, Loggins’ style had metamorphosed from the delicate, acoustic ballads and country-folk romps of his early career into a high-tech, occasionally production-heavy mix of rock tunes and power ballads. Many people had even come to associate him with blue-eyed soulster and erstwhile Doobie Brother Michael McDonald, with whom Loggins had scored the hits “This Is It” and “What a Fool Believes.”

“I wanted to make a simpler album than I’d been making,” Loggins acknowledged. “I had started feeling that, even with all the record success I’d achieved over the last five or six years, everything was falling apart instead of getting stronger. When I thought about it, I realized that I was moving further and further from what I do best: writing songs on acoustic guitar, about things that matter to me personally.”

Loggins allowed that, over the years, the songs that resulted from that subjective approach were also favorites with his audience, whether or not they were hit records. Quite often, as in the cases of “Danny’s Song,” “Love Song,” “House at Pooh Corner” and “Celebrate Me Home,” they were not hits. The song “This Is It”--about Loggins’ father’s fight with terminal illness--was an exception.

“I saw clearly the direction I had to take,” he said. “I had to stop caring about radio formats and whether my records were getting played, because I knew that, in chasing that illusion of success, I was losing me.”

In a return to form, “Leap of Faith” boasts softer, more sensuous textures. On an apparently superficial level, one also noticed that Loggins had abandoned the stylishly short hair he wore throughout the ‘80s. As it turned out, the longer locks were more than a coincidence.

“You know, it’s funny,” he said, “when my ex-wife and I separated, the first thing I wanted to do was grow my hair. Only later did it occur to me that it was a symbolic reclamation of a person I’d felt I’d lost. Sometimes we change for change’s sake, and other times it has a metaphorical purpose. As my hair grew out, I realized that it was an outward manifestation of that sensuous style I’d left behind.”

Loggins, 44 and the father of three, feels an imperative to reach those older music lovers whom, he feels, the music industry has all but forsaken. He also sees a dearth of genuine emotion in much of today’s music, but he senses an imminent change, and he hopes to help promote it, not only with “Leap of Faith,” but with the music he writes from now on.

“I think that for the last 10 years or more, music has reflected our collective emotional denial,” he said. “We, as a society, have not wanted to feel. The music pretty much says, ‘Let’s dance, let’s . . . .’ Or it screams in anger. But it’s becoming important again to actually feel things. People are starving for something emotional. I think a part of the college audience is beginning to wish it had something other than oatmeal, and maybe the popularity of a group like R.E.M. reflects that.”

To that end, Loggins is gearing up to write again, and, although it’s too soon to say what form the next album will take, a couple of songs-in-progress suggest that it will be an extension of “Leap of Faith.”

“It’s a little scary, in a way, because I know now what I had to go through to do ‘Leap of Faith,’ and what’s required of me to write 10 or 12 songs that touch a nerve in me,” he said. “It’s like going into therapy for six months.”

One thing Loggins knows for certain is that he wants to stay in the guitar-oriented, melodic, R & B vein--a seemingly contradictory mix of styles that he claims as his roots.

“I started playing guitar during the folk period, then the Beatles came along and gave me my melodic sense, and then Aretha came along and gave me an attitude,” he said. “I feel like I’ve carried the black-white thing all along. Sometimes I sound folkier, like in (the new album’s) ‘Cody’s Song,’ and sometimes I sound funkier, like in ‘Too Early for the Sun.’ Both styles are inside me, and I’ve always felt that my task is to marry the two. That’s real natural to me--I wrote like that even before I met Jimmy (Messina).”

Loggins said and his band will perform a good portion of the “Leap of Faith” album during what he expects will be a two-hour show Monday. But, because the album has been out for more than a year, he feels he can more easily work older material into the show as well. Although he resisted tipping his hand as to which favorite tunes he’ll perform, there is one song that has been permanently banished from his repertoire: “Danger Zone,” the theme song Loggins recorded in 1986 for the film “Top Gun,” which glamorized fighter pilots.

“I don’t perform that song anymore,” he said tersely. “When they started bombing people with that as a sort of soundtrack, I was done with it. It’s ironic that I did a song like that, and I’ve found myself wondering how and why I did it. Where was the perfection in that? It’s hard to say.”

Fans at his shows continue to yell out other songs that Loggins no longer performs, but he’s confident that anyone who’s been a follower for more than a few years will be pleased with Monday’s selections.

“We do a good sprinkling of the solo-career material,” he said. “The band has a lot of music prepared, so I can just call things out according to what I feel is right for the moment. Ideally, I’d like to get more and more spontaneous with my concerts.”

Kenny Loggins performs at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Embarcadero Marina Park South (behind the San Diego Convention Center). Tickets are $15, $20 and $32.50 and are on sale at the Copley Symphony Hall box office (699-4205) and at all TicketMaster outlets (278-TIXS). On the day of the show, tickets can also be purchased after 4 p.m. at the Marina Park box office.