Slimmed Down and Coming Back for Seconds : Pop music: Cathy Cornell walked away from singing-songwriting, but she got depressed and gained weight. Then she got back on track.

When singer-songwriter Cathy Cornell got burned by a record producer, she did what a lot of aspiring musicians only contemplate. She quit.

Cornell’s contract with the producer, whom she prefers not to name, stipulated that he’d record 10 of her songs, then promote the album. But when nothing had happened after two years, Cornell decided she wanted out of the contract. She said she had to spend about $20,000 to break it.

Her break from show business, however, didn’t last long.

“I discovered that when you give up your dream,” Cornell says, “when you do something else, it’s going to take its toll somewhere. I gained weight; I got depressed.”

All that’s in the past now. The up-and-comer left her subsequent manager’s job at Federal Express four years ago and has gone back to her first love--music. She also shed 60 pounds along the way. She performs with the Doo Wah Riders on Saturday at Fanfest ‘95, the annual country-music festival at Pomona’s Fairplex.

Showing a visitor the well-equipped exercise room in her Aliso Viejo condo, she gave away her diet secret: “I do an hour every day on the treadmill and an hour with weights. Like Oprah says, it’s not because it’s fun to do; it’s because I needed to do it. I needed to start going for my dream.”

Cornell’s debut (self-produced) CD offers mostly love songs with a bluesy feel. Some pedal-steel guitar provides a country tinge. She calls her style “pop blues,” and her strong, alto voice has been likened to Bonnie Raitt’s when she’s sassy and Christine McVie’s when she delivers a yearning ballad.

“She’s definitely a crossover artist with a wide demographic appeal,” says Fanfest president Bob Alexander, who also is Cornell’s personal manager.

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Cornell’s career dream took seed in Jenks, Okla., a small town near Tulsa where the polite, petite, assertive thirtysomething-year-old (who won’t give her age) was raised. Wearing horse-print denim and a small cross to a recent interview, she said that both parents were Assembly of God ministers who had her singing in church by her 4th birthday.

“I started piano lessons at about 5 and started writing when I was about 10,” she said, crediting the gospel music she heard on Sundays for her bluesy inclination. “I had a love for rock ‘n’ roll and blues, especially blues. This was a church where everybody clapped.”

After majoring in piano at Tulsa’s Oral Roberts University, Cornell joined a trio, singing (mostly pop covers) and playing keyboard as she does today. She then moved to Los Angeles “to make it big,” so hopeful she even named her dog Grammy.

But Bowser died, and then there was that producer . . . .

“He was in love with a studio singer,” Cornell said, “and started wanting to promote her. . . . She was OK as a backup singer, but. . . . He was not thinking with his brain. I sort of got left by the wayside.”

So Cornell put her career aspirations on hold, moved to Orange County seven years ago and went to work for Federal Express. She never, however, stopped writing and eventually put on a small concert organized at a friend’s Laguna Beach home.

“The response was so amazing,” she said. “People came up to me and said, ‘I cannot believe this is what you do and you’re working at Federal Express.’ So I thought, ‘Well, OK, I better start losing some weight.’ ”

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Stardom, even hit-dom, hasn’t come as quickly as slimming down. Cornell hasn’t signed with a label yet, and her CD so far has gotten airplay on only two Colorado radio stations--one in Denver, the other in Colorado Springs, where she managed to get it to program directors.

But she’s opened for R & B singer James Ingram and folk singer-songwriter Leo Kottke at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, as well as Canadian folkie-turned-cowboy singer Ian Tyson at the San Diego Coach House.

She’ll sing on Fanfest’s “New Faces” stage at 2 p.m. and on its main stage at 6 p.m. (She said she signed with Alexander months after he booked her for Fanfest and hopes that, once she sings, people will know that talent, not connections, got her the gig.)

The first song Cornell ever wrote, “Kiss Me in the Morning,” was racy for the adolescent daughter of two conservative ministers (“my mother thinks Rush Limbaugh is a liberal”). But things have only heated up.

In “Life Ain’t What It’s Supposed 2-B,” her CD’s title cut, she writes a lyric that family newspapers must amend: “I thought people would turn around and stare and wish they had a piece” of the action.

In “Sure Know How to Make Love,” she writes: “Why I’d just die if anyone knew I’d been in bed with you for hours on end. . . . How is it you never lose your way right straight to my erotic zone.”

It’s all done “tongue in cheek,” Cornell said. “If you look at all the talk shows (with lurid sex topics) and all the romance novels, people do take these things very, very seriously. But to me, there’s just a lot of humor in it. (My songs) are like laughing at yourself a little bit.”

And how about that upbringing?

“Christianity is a very personal thing to me,” she said. “It’s not a religious thing. I’m not trying to please a church; I’m trying to please God, and I try to do it in such a way that is humorous.”

Of course, not all of her songs are flippant, and she said she omits sexual connotations from more serious tunes, sticking instead to matters of the heart. As for source material, she may take inspiration from the lives of friends or strangers.

“I was sitting on the beach in Hawaii, and a woman who had missed her plane came up next to me and started talking about her life with her husband. When I finished that conversation, I literally picked up a Moana Surf Rider Hotel napkin and wrote ‘Falling Out of Love With You.’ It was her story.”

The story of Cornell’s life is alluded to in “Life Ain’t What It’s Supposed 2-B,” she said.

“There are three things that every 20-year-old is pretty sure they’re going to have: They’re going to be really successful; they’re going to look really great, and they’re going to have a great love affair.

“All you have to do is make it to 30, and you start finding out that being really successful is hard. Also, we all know the struggle of loving the way we look--getting the hair, the face, the body the way we like it. And then romance is the biggest of all. You’re just convinced you’ve met the love of your life, and then it’s gone, and it didn’t work, and here you are.

“So I hope the song reaches out to people in their 30s and 40s and 50s--and any age--and says, ‘Yeah, OK, life doesn’t always turn out the way you want it to.’

“But I hope they’ll see, through my life, that I decided to get out there and try again,” she said. “If there’s one thing I’d want to get through to people, it’s ‘go for it, go for your dream. You’ll be your happiest if you’re doing what you do best.’ ”

* Cathy Cornell sings today at 2 and 6 p.m. at Fanfest ‘95, which runs 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. through Sunday at Fairplex, 1101 W. McKinley Ave., Pomona. Tickets , $17 (advance, available at Wherehouse stores) or $20 (at the gate). (310) 358-0900.