Hiatt’s Redeeming Qualities : Now Out of Hell, Singer-Songwriter Hauntingly Explores Whether Life’s Good Side Will Last

Where do you go when you’ve been to hell and back? If you’re John Hiatt, the answer is obvious: You go somewhere else.

The central theme of the estimable singer-songwriter’s music over the past 10 years has been redemption--long-sought redemption, hard-won redemption, by-the-grace-of-God redemption, even unattainable redemption. He has written about people who pushed their luck, their love or their lives to the very brink of destruction and who then came back, often with a newfound humility.

With the songs from his latest album, “Walk On”--which dominated his haunting, ultimately exhilarating set Sunday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre--Hiatt, who was scheduled to play the Coach House on Monday, no longer is asking “are the bad times really over?” but “can the good times really last?”

It’s the frightening but inescapable question facing anyone who, like Hiatt himself, has been to the bottom and found his way back up again. Having explored the return to the surface so masterfully in his “Bring the Family,” “Slow Turning” and “Stolen Moments” albums, he started in 1993’s “Perfectly Good Guitar” to examine whether ghosts escaped are truly ghosts exorcised.

“Walk On” brings a full frontal assault on that theme. Throughout, he sketches characters looking over their shoulders, almost waiting for the day when those ghosts will reappear.

In “Dust Down a Country Road,” the shadow of the past takes the form of an old dog staring at the dust. The singer would

catch that old dog napping

and I’d shoot him before he runs

cause he ain’t much good for nothing

except staring at the dust.

In a characteristically endearing moment, Hiatt told the packed house how upset his 7-year-old daughter got when she first heard the song. After reassuring her that he’d never really shoot a dog, he went on to explain to her that the dog is a metaphor, to which she matter-of-factly replied, “Oh”--as if suddenly it all made sense.

Later, having displayed some of his half-geeky, half-charming dance steps, he confessed: “I know I look like somebody’s dad when I dance, but I don’t care.” That sense of humor leavens the darker moments (and in Hiatt’s songs, there are many) but also keeps them tied to an average-guy sort of life.

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The album gives off a sense of fate preparing to pounce--which wasn’t as pronounced in concert, even though Hiatt included eight of the album’s 13 songs.

He could have given the “Walk On” songs a greater impact by grouping them together, leading the audience through a concentrated exploration of the evanescence--and therefore the preciousness--of happiness in life. As it was, the “Walk On” material was interspersed with such life-savoring numbers from the recent past as “Slow Turning,” “Have a Little Faith in Me” and “Real Fine Love.”

Songs new and old in the 90-minute performance were played with plenty of muscle by Hiatt’s real fine three-man Nashville Queens band: multi-instrumentalist David Immergluck (late of Camper van Beethoven) and former Cracker bassist and drummer Davey Faragher and Michael Urbano, respectively.

Faragher and Urbano have been touring with Hiatt for a couple of years now and have locked into a Gibraltar-solid rhythm section. The foundation they laid allowed Hiatt, and especially Immergluck, to explore a boggling variety of musical settings.

Immergluck found appropriate textures for each song, moving from steel guitar to electric to mandolin to Strum Stick (essentially an electric dulcimer). His steel screamed and cried during “Wrote It Down and Burned It,” capturing the whine of a girl who dies next to a railroad track, apparently of self-immolation over a broken romance.

(Immergluck also provided a great visual addition from top to bottom, sporting really great hair--a thick ponytail top-mounted over cascades of wavy locks falling past his shoulders--as well as a nifty pair of sparkling silver shoes that looked like they’d been lifted from a “Lost in Space” crew locker.)

On the “Walk On” album, Hiatt frames his subjects sonically with a fuzzy-around-the edges aural atmosphere that helps convey the shadowy fears he is flushing out into the light. Sunday, however, he and his band shed all haze, for the most part, and played instead with a striking toneful quality.

“Native Son,” a song that examines the legacy of the politics of exclusion and divisiveness, was built on double-thump bass and bass-drum rhythm that pulsed like a heartbeat and, simultaneously, evoked an American Indian ceremonial drumbeat.

After a false ending, the band kicked into the song again, Immergluck churning a “Shaft”-like wah-wah R&B; guitar riff over the same throbbing beat and a slipping, sliding bass line that spookily approximated a didjeridoo. It all combined to musically embody the song’s subtle plea for unity.

And it showed anew how, among his many other strengths, Hiatt has always used the power of the deep rhythmic groove to touch places in the soul that words alone can never reach.

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Opening act Ron Sexsmith dedicated his debut album to the late Harry Nilsson, which is not a bit surprising. Like Nilsson (especially in his early work), Sexsmith projects the endearing sweetness of an artist willing to open his heart for all to examine.

That heart isn’t hard to find: This rumpled-looking alterna-folkie keeps it on his sleeve nearly all the time. In “Speaking With the Angel,” the main character is a naif who seems to be in touch with his own private heavenly messenger. The central question, posed in all earnestness, is whether it’s right to “poison him with prejudice from the moment of his birth.”

This 32-year-old from Toronto has a voice that has been described accurately as a youthful Jackson Browne’s, although Sexsmith meanders with melodies more than Browne does, sounding as if he’s being buffeted across the choppy seas of love.

While he comes off at times like a hopeless romantic, he has more in common with the likes of Jonathan Richman and Alex Chilton--fellow singer-songwriters who are similarly wide-eyed yet who underneath are all too aware of life’s harshness.

In his quick 30 minutes on stage, Sexsmith suffered the fate of the proverbial solo guy with a guitar: He strummed his heart out, but without the added color that other musicians bring to his album, he had trouble making one melancholy ballad distinct from the next.

His brief attempt to “rock out,” as he put it--”First Chance I Get”--was so muted that it wouldn’t have gotten him tossed out of a Baptist coffeehouse.