Ketchum Dared to Dream : Country: When singing clashed with his settled life, he went for the music. He’ll perform Sunday at the Coach House.

Hal Ketchum’s latest album, “Sure Love,” ends with a song about a restless soul in the Old West--a man who sees a newspaper account about wagons heading for gold country, and catches the prospecting fever on the spot.

Ketchum’s song, “Someplace Far Away,” is ambiguous as to whether the man follows through on his dream. He is married to a woman who “didn’t want to be no . . . prospector’s wife,” according to the young son who is the tale’s narrator. Will dad be able to persuade mom to join him in lighting out for the territories? Or will he remain settled and allow the dream to fade?

At the song’s end, the newspaper that fueled all the domestic commotion burning winds up in the family’s stove--and it’s up to the listener to decide whether that symbolizes the father’s dreams turning to ash, or the mother’s marriage going up in smoke because her husband has decided to answer a call that she can’t hear.

Don’t expect Ketchum to settle the matter for you. “Who knows? I’m not sure what the resolution is myself,” he said over the phone Thursday from his home in Nashville.

In his own life, though, the 40-year-old country singer had to resolve a very similar conflict.

Ten years ago, Ketchum was a carpenter and cabinetmaker with a solid, settled life, running his own shop in Gruene, Tex., married and raising two children while playing a little music on the side.

There was no sudden, transforming call that led him to abandon two-by-fours for footlights, but by 1990, Ketchum faced a choice between staying settled in Texas and pursuing his musical dreams in Nashville. He chose the dream, and his marriage ended.

“That song is very autobiographical, as far as dream-chasing to (play) music,” he said. “That had a lot to do with that marriage ending.”

Ketchum said that his wife wanted stability, like the woman in “Someplace Far Away”--”and quite rightly so. But I was enthralled with being on stage and singing my own songs. I didn’t know anything about the music business, and it was difficult to reassure somebody else about something I didn’t understand.”

“This kind of work requires a certain amount of self-evaluation. You’ve got to be willing to look at who you are,” Ketchum said. His self-evaluation told him to light out for the territories.

Ketchum, who plays at the Coach House on Sunday, literally struck gold with “Past the Point of Rescue,” the 1991 album that he says has now sold more than 900,000 copies. “Sure Love,” released last year, remains on the country charts and has sold more than 400,000 copies.

Both records fit into the current trend of country albums that echo the 1970s Southern California rock sound epitomized by the Eagles: clean, well-played productions that combine rock, country and folk strains with a sensitive, often introspective songwriting slant. With his firm but aching, verge-of-a-teardrop voice, Ketchum occupies much the same ground in ‘90s Nashville that J.D. Souther did in ‘70s L.A.

“A lot of people who were playing sessions on those (‘70s) records or were producing them live in Nashville now,” Ketchum said. As far as the music’s appeal, he said, “I’d hate to say it’s a generational thing” of baby boomers trying to recapture a peaceful, easy feeling from the past. “It just doesn’t appear that way, because a remarkable number of kids are attracted to this music and inspired by it.

“That (‘70s country-rock) style has influenced the music, but it’s only one of the elements. There’s the great hillbilly church (of traditional country) that we honor, and elements of Celtic and British music that came through the Appalachians. I like to say this is American music. If it’s categorized as country music, fine. But things have opened up a lot, and the edges (between styles) aren’t as crisp.”

Ketchum grew up in Greenwich, N.Y., a small town in the Adirondack Mountains, near the Vermont border. His father liked the Buck Owens/Merle Haggard brand of rockin’-country music that came out of Bakersfield; his mother favored such crooners as Sinatra.

“Music was a very important part of the mood of the household,” he recalled. “I was always encouraged in it.”

Ketchum got a set of drums when he was 12 and began playing along to hard-rock records. “I would wear the grooves out of Steppenwolf and the James Gang.”

At 15, he was playing professionally in an R & B band. “I always had bands, but I did not intend to make it in the music business,” he said.

Carpentry and woodworking were his living. As he headed into his 30s, “I had a cabinet shop and a nice little house on the river in Gruene, Tex. (outside of Austin), and things were going my way,” Ketchum said.

Gruene also had a club where the cream of the fertile Austin music scene--Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Lyle Lovett, Jerry Jeff Walker, Townes Van Zandt and others--would appear each Sunday. Ketchum became a regular at those shows and caught the bug.

“After two or three months of being influenced by that, I jumped in. Jimmie Dale Gilmore was my greatest ally. Lyle was encouraging. Townes was encouraging,” he said. “That was my school. I just fell in with these songwriters.”

By the late 1980s, Ketchum had released an album, “Threadbare Alibis,” on a small, Austin independent label, Watermelon Records. He toured as a solo-acoustic opening act for Jerry Jeff Walker, whose company managed him for a time. Then Ketchum decided that Nashville was the place to take his dreams a step further.

Ketchum admits that this didn’t sit well with some of his Austin peers. The Texas country tradition has a folkie-Bohemian, art-for-art’s-sake ethic, and members of the Austin club tend to view Nashville as a factory town that churns out sleekly packaged but insubstantial product.

Ketchum says he still honors the Austin ethic but doesn’t share its prejudices about Nashville.

“I think Austin is blessed by not being an industry town. There’s a great artistic freedom. The people coming to hear the music are interested in original thought, not whether you merit a record deal and have the right cheekbones,” he said.

“A lot of the Austin players had bad experiences in Nashville in the ‘70s and returned to their home base feeling slighted and commercially exploited,” he said. “But I didn’t feel that way at all. My interest wasn’t in insulting the (Nashville) institution. It was in making a living in this marketplace.”

Ketchum found a Nashville-based mentor, Jim Rooney, a record producer and song publisher who had worked with such highly regarded artists as John Prine, Nanci Griffith and Townes Van Zandt.

“I really trusted his music history and personal integrity,” he said, “so I came to Nashville in a very good position. I didn’t come begging with my hat in the hand, (willing to) take any deal.”

Ketchum signed with Curb Records, a high-profile independent company, rather than with a major label. Rooney and Allen Reynolds, noted for his work on Garth Brooks’ albums, produced both of Ketchum’s Curb albums, using a crew of established Nashville session players.

“I’ve been allowed to make the records I would have made anywhere,” Ketchum said.

Still, he acknowledges a difference between the clean, precise sound on his albums, and the bracing, hard-charging attack that came across live when he brought his touring band of old Austin cronies to the Cowboy Boogie Co. in Anaheim two years ago.

Ketchum said the members of his road band--guitarist Scott Neubert, drummer Wes Starr and bassist Keith Carper--relocated to Nashville last year and have begun to get some session work when they aren’t on tour with him.

“I think those two worlds are coming back together,” he said. “The edge you’re referring to will become more and more apparent. I don’t feel like I’m applying for the job any more. I feel like I’ve got the job.”

In carrying on with the job, Ketchum has had no trouble finding good help. When he heard that Al Anderson, singer-guitarist of the vaunted, unclassifiable pop-rock band, NRBQ, was writing songs for a Nashville publishing house, he called the publisher and quickly hooked up with Anderson as a writing partner.

“I’d seen Al work for years and been a big fan,” Ketchum said. The duo has written six songs. Two of them, “Morning Sun” and “That’s What I Get for Losing You,” are among the new songs Ketchum has been playing on stage lately as he prepares to record another album this fall.

As Ketchum pursues his second life as a country star, remarried to a woman who works at a song publishing company, he hasn’t burned bridges with his past--as one imagines the prospector in “Someplace Far Away” might have, if he had followed his dream.

After shooting a video last week in Palm Desert for “Mama Knows the Highway,” an ode to a female interstate trucker, he flew home to Nashville for a pit stop before heading on to San Antonio, Tex., to attend his daughter’s high-school graduation. This summer, Ketchum said, he’ll be bringing the 15-year-old son from his first marriage on the road as his drum technician. And occasionally, when he isn’t crafting songs, Ketchum still gets out his old woodworking tools.

“I’ve got a cradle I’m working on,” he said. “It will probably be for a grandkid by the time I’m done.”

* Hal Ketchum and Ronny Cox play Sunday at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $22.50. (714) 496-8930.