Acts of Love and Other Stories : The eccentric portraits in Victoria Williams’ songs can’t help but reflect the hard times, simple kindness and enduring faith she’s known the last few years. It’s like nothing else in pop music.

‘ Over here!” calls out Victoria Williams’ in her unmistakably high-pitched twang, from somewhere mysterious in the vicinity of her smallish Laurel Canyon home. Her voice is coming from next door, but with all possible entrances to her neighbor’s house locked, and an eight-foot wooden fence in between, Williams’ fetching Lousiana accent seems destined to remain disembodied for the moment.

Finally she yells over instructions on how to find the hole in the fence, which turns out to be easy enough to stoop through, give or take a couple of vines. Next door, Williams is swimming laps in a pool, as her neighbor has allowed her to do every day for the last three weeks or so. The semi-secret passage was already there before this arrangement was struck.

“I’m so fortunate to have this. I think these people who built these two houses were friends, because they made this gap in the fence,” Williams says as she skims sideways across the pool, seeming as pleased as a kid who’s happened across somebody else’s fort in the forest.

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These nearly inconsequential little acts of friendship--present and presumably past--are the sort that mean a lot to Williams, 36, a singer-songwriter who seems to feed on decent gestures and enduring spirits as sweet grist for her strikingly warm and hopeful music. Rendered in Williams’ unique voice, the milk of human kindness is not at all milquetoast, but the wonderful stuff of eccentric forbearance.

Truest love is both a quirky and eternal thing in “Loose,” Williams’ engaging third album, which combines some of the weird little narratives we’re trained to expect from a conventionally twisted Southern writer with a gospel singer’s faith in human as well as divine nature.

Here there are odes to friendship itself (“My Ally,” a duet with Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner), offbeat eulogies for late friends (“Happy to Have Known Pappy,” “Harry Went to Heaven”), songs about old folks who find renewal and purpose late in life (“Century Plant”), and straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll spirituals (“You R Loved”). It’s like nothing else in pop, of course. ( See review, Page 74.)

Williams once toured with Jonathan Richman, and it’s easy to see why they’d make a natural pairing. The difference is that Williams is not such the deliberate naif , but brings a guilelessness to subject matter that tends toward the more mature.

Paul Fox, the new album’s producer, said in a separate interview that Williams “does have that combination of the childlike innocence and the wise sage rolled up into one. She’s incredibly sweet, and might appear to be naive, but she’s certainly not. She appreciates every little detail of everything that’s going on around her at all times, and she’s not just what you see on the surface. She couldn’t write songs like that if she didn’t see things in such deep, meaningful ways.

“But whenever she would approach anything she would approach it with complete, childlike enthusiasm,” said Fox. “Especially given her new physical situation, it was just incredibly inspiring to see someone with such a positive attitude.”

Out here today, Williams is not exercising merely for the fun of it but swimming, she believes, for her life.

“I’ve always been a person who loves to swim,” she says--as a child, she plied the Cane River, near her hometown of Shreveport--”but then, when that thing came around, everybody said swimming’s the best exercise.”

The “thing” was multiple sclerosis, which was diagnosed in early 1992 after she had some trouble with her hands while on tour opening for Neil Young. Having developed an understandable interest in holistic health, she’s read up on the benefits of water exercise for relieving the stress that makes symptoms worse.

“There was a study done with this doctor who was ahead of his time back in the ‘40s, with all these people that had that MS,” she says, standing upright in the pool, “and he had people on this high-vitamin swimming diet. And the people that were in his group were all still alive in like ‘75, and the ones that weren’t doing the swimming every day all were dead by the time of the ‘60s. And they never include that in the AMA stuff; they just want people to be sick.” And it’s back to the breast stroke.

This last comment is about as bitter as Williams seems to get. Asked if, as a longtime devout Christian, she found the onset of her malady faith-testing, she insists that it was instead “strengthening, faith- strengthening . Trials are a blessing that are given to a person to endure and become strong, even if they seem like something bad.

“It puts me more in a position of leaning on God. Which is a good position to be in.”

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It may seem either much too faithful or much too perverse to trace the connection between Williams’ trial and the way her career has recently been blessed. Yet, through a series of events that goes back to the discovery of her MS, she finds herself more renowned and more revered than ever--on the precipice of breaking through from cult artist to, well, major cult artist at least.

Like many musicians, Williams had no health insurance at the time of the diagnosis. Fellow musician T Bone Burnett organized a benefit for her at the Whisky in June of ’92 that featured Counting Crows, Sam Phillips, Maria McKee, Michael Penn and several other acts, and she was able to pay off a stack of bills later that night. Out of that good will Williams resolved to establish what became the Sweet Relief Foundation, which would collect donations on behalf of other musicians who found themselves ill and ill-financed.

The primary contributor to the foundation so far has been the 1993 album “Sweet Relief--A Tribute to Victoria Williams,” in which a couple of artists who were at the Whisky benefit and a lot more who weren’t perform her songs. One track, Pearl Jam’s brooding “Crazy Mary,” became a staple of rock radio as that band’s star was just ascending. And cuts by well-known artists including Lou Reed, Soul Asylum, Evan Dando, Matthew Sweet and many others upped the cache value for alternative music fans who’d never even heard of Williams before.

“It felt like a genuinely loving record,” Williams says, using her hands to scoop away the bougainvillea leaves that seem to migrate toward her in the pool. “I remember the first time I heard it, I was in Louisiana and I was driving down this gravel road, and I stopped just to listen to it. I had it turned up with the windows down, and the bugs were singing really loud, and it seemed like they were singing with it.”

The notoriety brought about by “Sweet Relief” puts Williams in an interesting position, now that she’s finally releasing a post-tribute album of her own. Millions have heard her name, if only as FM disc jockeys back-announced the album whence that bitchin’ Pearl Jam track came. But what will the hordes who know only of her think of her own version of “Crazy Mary,” being released as the first track to radio from “Loose”?

What will they make of a singer whose unusual style and jazzy-folk phrasing have gotten her compared to everyone from Rickie Lee Jones to Olive Oyl (favorably, of course)? Of the woman whose writing so evokes the rural that she might seem almost equal parts Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Van Dyke Parks and Uncle Remus? Are they ready for the country, as it were?

“Could you hand me that towel?” she asks, shaking her hair and shaking off the self-consciousness that answering such a question would entail. “Well,” she says simply, her voice rising to a high pitch of cheerful ingenuousness, “I hope they have a good time!”

‘I ‘m sorry you didn’t get to meet Molly,” says Williams, leading the way back through the fence portal and into her house. Molly is the dog seen on the cover of “Loose,” but she’s not home right now--nor is her husband of 10 months, Mark Olson of the critically admired roots-rock band the Jayhawks. (Living in her basement now is ex-Lone Justice drummer Don Heffington, who wrote this album’s “Psalms”; “We’re all snug as a bug in a rug,” she reports of the setup.)

This is the second time Williams has put a favored pooch on an album cover. The first was with the 1987 Geffen release “Happy Come Home,” which had the late, beloved Belle on the front sleeve.

Though the title song of that debut was a fictionalized plea for another pet dog to, yes, come home, the album title had a broader resonance for what Williams was going through at the time. Then, Williams was living just up the street from where she resides now, with her first husband, singer Peter Case, to whom she was wed for six years.

Right around the time she went off to New York to record “Happy Come Home,” she and Case were starting to talk about divorce. The tension, she laments, threw her voice out of whack during the sessions.

“I was an emotional wreck,” she recalls, toweling off, “so I was really emotional and tight. And when I get nervous, my voice gets all shaky-sounding. I felt like I shouldn’t be doing a record. I liked the songs and wanted to do ‘em right, so I had thought, ‘Let’s just do it later,’ but they wouldn’t let me stop it, so I had to finish it.”

Her second album, 1990’s “Swing the Statue,” was recorded under far less duress. But because it was done for a small label, the now-defunct Rough Trade, the trip to the studio was quick and cheap.

“Plus, on both those albums,” Williams says, “it was like not live stuff, it was always overdub--first you do the music and then you sing later. I like to get in there at the bare-bones bottom of it; rather than having the voice fit in with what else is going on.”

This time, Williams got her wish to record “live.”

Her domestic situation made recording more relaxed this time as well. “It’s very nice being married to someone who loves you,” Williams says of Olson, who talked her into marrying him just last Christmas after a decade of friendship, interstate correspondence and very intermittent dating.

Their wedding scene was “like a Capra movie!”: Olson had the license drawn up in secret, took her to the Opelousas, La., courthouse and sprung a ring. Surprised, she initially balked, but the court clerks gathered round and begged her to reconsider. Then the judge, who’d been sent home, showed up again in response to a mysterious phone call no one would own up to. “And I thought, shiver me timbers, it is a sign, Lord!”

The serendipitous couple divide their time between Laurel Canyon and a second home in the desert near Yucca Valley, where Williams beats the heat and latent MS symptoms with regular swims at the local mineral hot springs pool. Several of the characters who figure into this album’s songs are California high-desert locals who gather at the saloon.

Asked if the desert attracts an odd sort of citizen, she demurs: “Basically, there’s just less people, so individuals stick out more. It does attract people who are fed up with the city completely, and like the desert because it’s a thing of wonder, and there’s a sense of quiet that’s very loud , seeping through your soul. That’s why I go out there.”*