Loggins’ Guiding Words: Once More, With Feelings

Kenny Loggins is about as macho as a roomful of Alan Aldas. You just can’t picture the guy kicking back in an easy chair, smoking a stinky cigar as he scratches himself and watches the Evander Holyfield fight.

It’s the Kenny Factor at work--the cosmic dictum that Musicians Named Kenny Shall Be Sensitive Boys. Witness Kenny G, Kenny Rogers, Kenny Rankin. Witness Kenny Loggins, who plays the Freedman Forum in Anaheim on Friday.

His latest project takes his emotional muse to new heights of hearts and flowers. “The Unimaginable Life,” a concept book and CD about the love shared between Loggins and his wife, Julia, were released concurrently in July but sold separately. A combination of music, poetry, prose, diary entries and personal letters, “The Unimaginable Life” stands as a testament to the spiritual epiphany Loggins experienced through his marriage.

“I felt like I wanted to make a statement through the use of a book and a record together,” Loggins said in a recent phone interview. “It was most important to me at this time to make a statement about things I believe in and the things I’ve learned. What’s commercially acceptable and what’s unacceptable is no longer the issue. This is really about what I feel I need to do in my life.”

Time will tell how this latest project will play with existing fans, but Loggins is determined, after a career that’s seen him consistently score hits for nearly 30 years, to speak his creative mind about the meaning of life and love.

“The book is very much about coming out of the closet about my beliefs on love and spirituality,” he said. “Not everybody is going to jump up and down and go, ‘Oh, boy!’ Not everybody is going to relate to what I have to say. But I believe enough people will that I’ll find an audience for it.”

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Through his five-year marriage to Julia, Loggins said he’s finally found inner peace and contentment, experienced a spiritual epiphany. Describing himself as someone who had been “hopelessly incapable of monogamy” in a previous marriage, Loggins said he has now found the path to enlightenment by surrendering himself fully to love and devotion for his current union.

“Before I met Julia, I was living the life I thought I was supposed to be living, collecting all the signposts of success as I went along. I wasn’t faithful to my first wife. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t even know what faithful meant. I felt like I was starving to death.

“Now, I believe the love I’ve experienced for Julia has given me a core center. The love between a man and a woman is a gift from the spirit, not a man-made thing that we force into being by the acts of our own wills. If we look at the models we have for relationships--primarily what we learned from our parents--they’re based on placating partners’ fears. You learn to be an acceptable form of a husband by not doing the things your wife doesn’t want you to do. The problem with that is that we tend to go to sleep within the relationship. Parts of who we are get lost and atrophy in a relationship based on fear.”

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But as he loses himself in what Steve Miller called “The Pompatus of Love,” has Loggins cast aside his ambitions as one of pop music’s preeminent singer-songwriters of the age?

With a track record reaching back to 1970 when he penned “House at Pooh Corner” for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, through the ‘70s as half of Loggins and Messina (“Danny’s Song,” “Your Mama Don’t Dance”), into the ‘80s with such solo hits as “Footloose” and “I’m Alright,” up to more recent times with the gold-selling albums “Leap of Faith” and “Return to Pooh Corner,” Loggins has enjoyed an unusually long string of pop successes.

“I think [“The Unimaginable Life”] is consistent in that the music is still pretty accessible,” he said. “It depends on how you perceive Kenny Loggins music. Because this is very much a love record, I leaned a little bit more heavily on my R&B; side. This is more like my ‘This Is It’ thing than it is ‘Footloose.’ I’ve been a moving target. I’ve covered a number of different styles, but I think my music has always touched people’s lives. I get letters from people who have had children born to it, people who got married to it and people who buried people to it. My music has been with people through significant rites of passage. In any aspect where the heart has been the central theme, that’s how I’d like to be remembered.”

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There will, however, always be fans who come to see Loggins expecting to hear a catalog of old hits. But while some artists in the throes of passion for their current project are resentful of being expected to act as human jukeboxes, Loggins doesn’t sever himself completely from his musical past.

“I’m comfortable with singing some old songs,” he said. “Sometimes I do them and sometimes I don’t. I do hate it when people yell out for ‘Summer Breeze’--as recorded by Seals and Crofts as opposed to Loggins and Messina. That’s happened a few times. And Dan Fogelberg. Sometimes people confuse me with Dan Fogelberg.”

Though he doesn’t turn his back on the past, Loggins has no plans of repeating it in the future. Loggins feels that “The Unimaginable Life” marks a turning point in his career and that it would be impossible to return to making simple collections of pop songs again. Julia has changed his life, his life has changed his music, and Loggins says there can be no looking back.

“This could be the apex of my career,” he said. “I’ve managed to present love as a tangible moment. What I go back to after this I don’t know, but I doubt if I can go back to pop music. It’s kind of like when John Lennon got together with Yoko Ono. After that, he couldn’t really go back and just make a collection of pop songs again, even if he wanted to, because he had changed so dramatically. You can’t go back to sleep.”

* An Evening With Kenny Loggins, Friday at Freedman Forum, 201 East Broadway, Anaheim. 8 p.m. $42.50 and $37.50. Ticketmaster, (714) 740-2000, or Friday at the Freedman Forum, (714) 999-9599.