POP MUSIC REVIEW : Still Sorting Things Out, It’s Ketchum as Catch Can : The singer-songwriter seems be sifting through influences in a sometimes gripping, sometimes aimless show at the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana.

Hal Ketchum doesn’t come to Nashville by the usual country roads. Born and raised in the Adirondacks of New York state, he played drums in R & B bands as a youth, then moved into the Austin singer-songwriter scene of the early ‘80s--Lyle Lovett, Butch Hancock, Townes Van Zandt et al. Add Van Morrison and Jonathan Edwards influences to the usual country foundation of Haggard and Jones, throw in a bit of literary sensibility and you have the makings of something slightly different.

Performing on the first of two nights at the Crazy Horse on Monday, Ketchum appeared to be still sorting it all out, and in the process turned in an often dynamic, sometimes gripping and occasionally aimless first show.

You’d expect someone with that Austin schooling to show a more assertive songwriting hand, but the Ketchum credit adorns barely more than half the 20 songs on his two major-label albums. That’s the area he needs to establish, because those are generally the best songs, and as a pure singer he’s not quite a commanding presence.

On record his voice has a melancholy tug and a subtle smokiness, but at the Crazy Horse he exchanged those facets for a more predictable nightclub intensity. He did have some welcome moments of finesse, notably an encore version of Ferlin Husky’s classic “Wings of a Dove” showcasing a high, lonesome vocal with a Gram Parsons edge.

Intelligence and alertness underpinned the performance. Ketchum is no threat to Billy Ray Cyrus as a sex symbol--he looked a little like Rick Moranis in a John Mellencamp wig, and was more perky than sultry--but he did draw a table or two of screaming female fans, whom he acknowledged with warmth and grace.

When he delivered top-rate originals--”Till the Coast Is Clear,” a Lovett-like shuffle; the classic-sounding “I Know Where Love Lives”; the new, pop-hooked anthem “Sure Love”--Ketchum looked like a true contender, especially when he put his two most striking songs near each other early in the show.

“Someplace Far Away,” a song from his Texas folkish period revived for the new album, is a rich ballad about the double-edged nature of life’s dreams, and “Daddy’s Oldsmobile” uses the trappings of a slice of typical nostalgia to carry a very atypical tale of desperation and determination.

But Ketchum, who also appears tonight at the Ventura Theatre in Ventura and Sunday at the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Los Angeles, undermined these powerful moments with too many rocking instrumentals.

Ketchum is a modified traditionalist, and in concert he scrapped even the minimal fiddle, pedal steel and keyboards of the records to work in the concentrated vortex of a tight, guitar-bass-drums combo. There wasn’t much variety in texture, but at times Ketchum and company worked up some spirited rhythm ecstasies behind Scott Neubert’s heroic lead guitar work.