Bruce Cockburn: Interior Motive : Pop music: Now that the world’s political landscape has changed, the rocker, who comes to the Coach House on Wednesday, has set aside global issues to focus inwardly. For now, anyway.

Was calling off the Cold War the way to get Bruce Cockburn to cool down?

No politicized rocker ever captured the in-your-guts heat of righteous anger more vividly than this versatile Canadian did with his searing “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” in 1984. It’s the most vivid of several songs inspired by his travels in Central America during the period when the region was spattered with bloody little wars, stoked by the bigger but more controlled conflict between the Soviets and the United States.

Like every other well-known rocker who addressed those struggles during the Reagan-Bush era, Cockburn (pronounced Coburn ) leaned left and sided with the revolutionaries. With “Rocket Launcher,” he imagined striking a blow for oppressed Guatemalan peasants; the same album, “Stealing Fire,” included a paean to the Sandinista enterprise in Nicaragua.

A decade later, the Cold War is off and Cockburn’s current album, “Dart to the Heart,” sets aside overtly political issues to focus more inwardly on matters romantic, spiritual and philosophical.

Cockburn, who has released 22 albums since his debut in 1970, always has had a lot to say about inward as well as worldly concerns. But after a long streak of records dotted with protests against specific political, historical and environmental outrages, Cockburn--like Jackson Browne, Sting and Peter Gabriel on their most recent albums--clearly was less concerned this time with using the recording studio as a podium.

On the phone recently from a tour stop in Bozeman, Mont., Cockburn was asked about this seeming trend of topical songwriters turning inward.

“It’s tempting to try to make a generalization about it,” he said. “I’m too inside my own thing to be that objective. But when you’ve been involved in (political themes) for a certain time, other things have been left unsaid. You address those (personal and inner concerns), and that will produce a little vacuum (of political expression) that has to be filled later on.”

*

Cockburn, 49, says his current solo tour--which includes a show Wednesday at the Coach House--is a “mopping-up operation” covering cities he didn’t touch in an extensive round of full-band performances earlier this year.

With the advent of the adult-alternative radio format, which offers a home on the airwaves for his sort of serious, folk- and roots-influenced approach, he has had reason to stay on the road doing heavy promotional work. An accomplished singer-songwriter who can support himself with adept guitar playing, he has built a solid cult following in the United States, occasionally breaking through with more widely heard songs such as “Rocket Launcher,” “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” and his only Top 40 single, “Wondering Where the Lions Are” (1980).

Home, where he plans to spend more time in 1995 after keeping up a hectic pace of three studio albums in the past four years, is a farm outside Toronto, where the woman he lives with trains horses for show jumping. Cockburn, an outdoorsy type, has taken up the sport.

“I’ve been in a couple of little shows, but I’m competing against kids, basically, at my level. I started taking riding lessons in ‘87, I guess, because I was traveling in places where people use horses for transportation. You need to in a Third World country, once you get away from the capital city. I felt I should learn to operate an animal.”

At the philosophic core of “Dart to the Heart” is a song about how humans tend to operate like animals in their worst moments, then show godly potential in their best. Cockburn calls it “Burden of the Angel/Beast,” and says he isn’t sure himself whether the angelic or the beastly occupies the greater part of human nature.

“Today, I tend to think it’s the latter, but it varies from day to day. It depends on the mood and what you’ve just encountered. I think we’re just stuck with who we are, and (human nature) is always going to have both sides. I don’t think we’re redeemable in that sense.

“I think we are redeemed spiritually,” he added. (Cockburn often has tapped his Christian belief in writing songs. Last year, his holiday album, “Christmas,” tried to invest such well-roasted chestnuts as “Silent Night,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” with spiritual seriousness and a sense of fresh musical discovery.)

“But in terms of our earthly existence, (that beastly potential) is always there, no matter how much you try to let yourself do good. We are the weird animals we are, and we seem to be straddling this gap with one foot in the animal world entirely and the other foot in something we’ve never been able to entirely define for ourselves.”

With such past album titles as “Joy Will Find a Way,” “World of Wonders” and “Waiting for a Miracle,” Cockburn clearly has been willing to entertain high hopes. But even with the defusing of superpower confrontation, he doubts that he will lack fresh fodder for future songs of outrage and anguish.

“Ten or 20 years from now the Cold War is going to look like a picnic,” he said. “There are other ways it can go, but given the usual way we carry things off as human beings, it doesn’t look very hopeful to me. It may not be too long before we see the fruit of the plutonium-smuggling trade. We may be in for some hair-raising times.”

In writing songs about big issues, he said he strives to ground himself in particular experiences that he can feel vividly. “Most often they’re just a reaction to things, a kind of immediate emotional response to a situation I encounter,” he said.

“Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” which leads off the same album that features “Rocket Launcher,” seems to be drawn from the same Central American experience; one readily supposes the stirring number is an ode to romantic passion among the revolutionaries Cockburn met.

He says it actually was sparked by something much more ordinary.

“I was thinking about kids in a schoolyard, eighth-graders or ninth-graders who were bold enough to hold hands and feel the beginnings of passion for another person in the face of the no-future that they would be confronted with. I was thinking, ‘How can they envision a life in the face of so many things that appear to threaten it?’ ”

*

He maintains the revolutionaries-in-love interpretation works, though, and is pleased that some listeners have related the song to the AIDS crisis as well. Listeners sometimes are left guessing whether his songs of passionate yearning--including the current album’s “All the Ways I Want You” and “Bone in My Ear”--are addressed to an earthly romantic partner, or a divine presence.

“When I’m writing the song, I’m entirely aware of which it is,” he said. “To me (songs such as those two) are pretty carnal. But sometimes when you’re expressing longing for a person, deeper things creep into it. It’s fair enough if people want to read it the other way.”

After spending 11 songs on “Dart to the Heart” dealing with the fears and yearnings that come with love, the emptiness and spiritual hopes that arise from the death of a friend, and the risky duality of human nature, Cockburn ends the album with “Tie Me at the Crossroads,” a twangy, chug-along rocker that manages to grin a little.

Poking fun at himself, he shows that even hearts pierced by darts can have a light moment now and then.

“Although I want to be taken seriously, some people take it too far and start investing my insights with greater power than they ought to. At that point, you have to chuckle. It’s great for other people to take you seriously, but you’d better not be guilty of doing it to yourself.”

* Bruce Cockburn plays Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. $19.50. (714) 496-8930.