‘What’s Inside’ Is Very Personal : Pop music: Joan Armatrading, who’s at the Galaxy tonight, says her eclectic works represent things that ‘have touched me.’

Joan Armatrading has been a major star in Europe for years, but it’s been a more arduous road on these shores, where the singer-songwriter remains a critically acclaimed but relatively low-profile performer.

Perhaps that’s because Armatrading is a difficult artist to define. Her rich, warm vocals are idiosyncratic, and her music veers into wildly eclectic territory on each of her 14 albums. Her songs are intimate and confessional by nature, but many of her lyrics can be oblique, if artfully so.

Armatrading’s latest effort, “What’s Inside,” continues that enigmatic legacy. The album delves into a number of musical styles, and she considers it her most visceral collection of songs to date. Fans can get an introduction to Armatrading’s new material when she performs tonight at the Galaxy Concert Theatre--though if you don’t already have your tickets, you’ll have to wait a bit longer; the show is sold out.

“I tend to write about emotions and people’s relationships with each other,” she said in a recent phone interview. “This particular album is very personal, because I write about things that have sort of affected me, things that I’d like to say to people who have touched me. On all my albums, without exception, there are personal songs. Generally, the majority of the songs are written from observation and looking at people and writing about the things that I see.”

As for her arrangements, which have run the gamut from pop to reggae, blues, jazz and soul, Armatrading said she uses whichever style best befits a particular composition.

“When I write the albums, I write different styles of music on all of them, but they’ve all been very Joan Armatrading,” she said. “There’s a song on the new album called ‘Lost the Love,’ which is very bluesy. The song that opens the album is called ‘In Your Eyes,’ and it’s very jazzy. There’s a song called ‘Beyond the Blue,’ which would remind you of country-Western. I write different styles, but it’s all very much me, and I don’t think there’s any confusion as to what you’re listening to.”

Armatrading, 45, was born in the West Indies and moved to Birmingham, England, at age 7. She said that she came to her songwriting style completely naturally, that she never paid any attention to music as a child.

“I started to write when I was about 14,” she said. “I never listened to anything, never bought records or went to concerts. I started to write because my mother bought a piano, because she thought it was a good piece of furniture. I wrote my first songs on that.

“I didn’t play anyone else’s things, I didn’t play along with records, I just started straight in on my own--no piano lessons or guitar lessons either. Music was something that was in me that just naturally came out. I always say I have no control over music; it controls me. It’s like my own little vacuum.”

Armatrading’s first album, “Whatever’s for Us,” was released in 1974. Since then, she said, she hasn’t had the time or inclination to question what might have been had she followed a more commercial path.

“I can only be myself,” she said. “I was born Joan Armatrading, and I don’t know how to be anybody or anything else.

“I don’t know how to write or behave in any other artistic way than I do, and I’ve always been allowed to do that--to be myself. No record company has ever tried to get me to be a certain way or play a certain way. It just wouldn’t work. I’d clam up and wouldn’t do anything, then I’d go off and sit in my room by myself and just enjoy what I was doing.”

* Joan Armatrading performs tonight at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. Susan Warner opens. 8 p.m. SOLD OUT. (714) 957-0600.