CRYSTAL-CLEAR FAITH

Confession may be good for the soul, but it’s unusual to hear a star from the world of Christian pop music admit that lies and deceit were her means to an end at a crucial juncture in her life.

Then again, Crystal Lewis had extenuating circumstances: She was a teenager in love, faced with a Romeo and Juliet-like scenario in which her parents--her father, Holland Lewis, was pastor of the Anaheim First Church of the Nazarene--had forbidden contact with a suitor they deemed too old for her.

Love conquered in the end. The sneaking around stopped; the lies were confessed and reconciled, and--as fiances, then as husband and wife--Lewis and Brian Ray embarked on a 10-year journey to make records and spread the faith.

Last month it culminated in one of the top honors in Christian pop: Lewis won the Gospel Music Assn.’s Dove Award for female vocalist of the year. Lewis, as artist, and Ray, as co-producer, also won a Dove for Spanish language album of the year, for “La Belleza de la Cruz,” the translated version of her 1996 release, “Beauty for Ashes.”

Lewis, who lives in Newport Beach, also is showing deepening artistry. “Beauty for Ashes,” which has sold about 350,000 copies, and her new release, “Gold,” which peaked at No. 5 on the contemporary Christian albums chart, are notable for the soulful, sometimes aching grain in her large-scale, R&B-steeped; voice.

They also reflect Lewis’ willingness--not common in Christian pop--to let certain songs linger in depths of trouble and pain without pointing to faith as the automatic solution.

Lewis was reared in Anaheim, with her mother, Mary, as her musical guide and two younger sisters, Candace and Cassandra, as accompanists.

“We were just brought up around the piano, and we sang together. We still do when we’re together,” Lewis, an enthusiastic talker with a bright, friendly manner, said last week from a hotel in New Orleans, a stop on a three-month tour, her longest, that ends with a concert tonight at Calvary Church of Santa Ana.

“I was singing from the age of 4,” Lewis said. “She used to teach us songs in the car on the way to wherever, and we’d harmonize.”

Other early influences were gospel-pop musicians (Keith Green, Andrae Crouch, the Winans) and pop radio hits (Michael Jackson was an early favorite). She also lists Sade, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Maria McKee, Sting and Stevie Ray Vaughan as favorites.

Lewis, 28, was in her mid-teens when she joined Wild Blue Yonder, a Christian cow-punk band playing the local circuit.

“As a 16-year-old, it was not so much a ministry thing, but more of a ‘yeah, I’m in a band’ kind of thing,” Lewis said.

When Wild Blue Yonder made a record, Ray, who had come up playing drums in an Orange County Christian rockabilly band, photographed its album cover. Soon Lewis was eating a lot of deli meals: Ray’s day job was waiting tables at a deli on Dyer Road in Santa Ana, and Lewis would hang out there in defiance of parental edict. (“Dyer Rd.” is the title of an upbeat, rock/hip-hop fusion track from “Gold;” the opening line goes, “Walkin’ down Dyer Road, thinkin’ ‘bout life and lovin’ livin,’ ” although the song is not about the glow of young romance, but the feeling that comes from a sense of connection with God.)

“I got caught a few times,” Lewis said. “One time--this is terrible--Brian called my high school and got me out of school, and my mom happened to come that day and wanted to take me to lunch, and I wasn’t there. She called Brian’s house and found us. I knew I shouldn’t be sneaking around, but I didn’t know how else to do it. I had to have this relationship.”

Ray proposed when Lewis was 18. Her parents made her return his ring.

“We went back to them and said, ‘What can we do to make us work?’ ” The answer was to wait, while seeing a marriage counselor friend of her parents. “It was kind of on their turf, and the next time he asked me [Lewis was 19, Ray 25], they said, ‘We’re behind you.’ ”

Soon the couple was bridling at authority in the music business. Lewis’ first three albums, released from 1987 to 1990 by Orange County Christian label Frontline, left them craving creative freedom. Lewis was being molded into a Christian dance-pop answer to Janet Jackson or Paula Abdul and wanted to try other things.

In 1992, she and Ray started their own label, Metro One, “to experiment and see what we wanted to do. Our goal wasn’t ‘Let’s do this great big thing,’ but ‘Let’s make and sell our own records and see what happens.’ Any kind of success would have been overwhelming.”

One idea the couple hit on was to record Spanish versions of each record Lewis made. Not because Lewis was fluent--she had a high-school language-class background--but because nobody else in Christian pop was doing it. The releases are targeted mainly at Latin America, where Lewis has had a few concerts (Mexico City, Guatemala, Costa Rica) but no extended tours.

After three do-it-yourself efforts on Metro One (now home to several Christian rap and rock acts), Lewis and Ray signed with Nashville-based Myrrh Records, a major player in contemporary Christian music.

“We have definitely entertained their suggestions and involved them on a lot of decisions,” Lewis said. “The nice thing is, we have final say over all the creative process. If it wasn’t that way we would never have signed the deal.”

Frank Breeden, president of the Gospel Music Assn., says her success “is not unlike several other case studies. All of a sudden you hear about them, but they’ve been doing it for 10 or 15 years.”

What sets Lewis apart, Breeden said, was her history of do-it-yourself independence.

“The ability to work with her husband and be a small business and at the same time be creative, that in itself is pretty unique. She had enough staying power to hook up with a major label like Myrrh Records and still stay independent enough to keep the creative control that makes her uniquely Crystal.”

John Styll, publisher of CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) Magazine, points to her vocal ability: “People seem to be amazed, with good reason, that such an enormous voice comes out of such a small person.”

From “Beauty for Ashes,” Christian radio latched onto “People Get Ready . . . Jesus Is Comin’,” a pop-rock anthem with Beatlesque touches and a confident vocal. Written by Ray, producer and frequent songwriter on Lewis’ records, it looks forward to “the rapture,” when, according to believers, the Christian faithful will be separated from the rest of doomed humanity and whisked to heaven.

The album’s outstanding track, “Healing Oil,” written by Lewis’ brother-in-law, Chris Lizotte, borrows from the languid, modern-rock trip-hop style to depict a dying person’s yearning prayer.

Lewis said the ache in her performance was informed by news she got the day of recording: a close friend had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. While working on “Gold,” Lewis said, she learned that the 4-year-old daughter of another friend had leukemia. During that period, a friend’s husband was killed in an accident.

Those experiences, she said, fuel the album’s oscillation between joyful affirmations of faith and moments of unrelieved turmoil.

Said Lewis: “I don’t always find concrete answers, and that’s why faith is so important in the life of a Christian.”

*

Lewis asked the friend whose husband was killed: “ ‘Are you angry at God yet?’ It seems to me that would be my first reaction. Even though I believe, I would be so upset. But these friends who have dealt with these situations really do have . . . ‘the peace that passes understanding.’ ”

The title “Gold” alludes to the book of Job: “When he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.” On the title track, again by Lizotte, Lewis sings a chorus that some might take as an insensitive attempt to minimize the damage of tragedy--”All your heartaches, all your suffering, all your trials are gold.” But the aching melody and her torn, questioning tone register all the hurt in the world.

Lewis said the deaths and illnesses she reckoned with have transformed her from a singer with a shiny, big voice to one with a more burnished, tempered hue.

“I think age and maturity and experience have a great deal to do with it,” she said. “And I think spiritual maturity and growth have a great deal to do with it. They add to your ability to bring out the emotion in a song.”

Lewis’ awards and mounting record sales may attract mainstream pop scouts who will no doubt be impressed with her voice and the sharp, ambitiously detailed sound of her albums. Yet she has no intention of diluting her faith-spreading musical mission for the prospect of a pop crossover. Lewis’ only secular venue was the 1992 season on “Roundhouse,” Nickelodeon’s youth-oriented variety.

“That was a vacation,” she said. Now she’s committed to her real work, making Christian music with Ray as they raise their son and daughter, ages 4 and 2.

Ray has an entrepreneur’s vision of tapping mainstream labels’ marketing clout in service of what he and Lewis both term their “blatant” Christian message.

“I’m not sure [her songs] would fly on pop radio,” Ray, who usually travels with Lewis and their kids, said in a phone interview from their tour bus. “We’re trying to find a mainstream label we can partner with that would understand what she does and who she is.

“If you did a statistic of all the people in the world who say they’re Christian, you have a huge mass of people. And only about 2% of them know where to buy Christian music [which is sold mainly in Christian specialty bookstores and at shows]. We have to find a better way of selling.”

Whatever direction they take, Ray said, a decade of combining marriage with musical work has made their studio teamwork easier; he is happy that “Gold” features several songs they wrote jointly, a new method Ray thinks is “a better direction for us to go.”

“We pretty much have [our working relationship] down pretty smooth,” he said. “It gets to be a challenge, having your husband tell you you’re doing something wrong. On the early albums, we used to fight quite a bit. Now I know when to push and not to push.”

Lewis, with a laugh, questioned whether the inevitable creative tension between producer and artist has mellowed much.

“It’s still there. But before we were married, [when] I was working with other producers, it was difficult because I didn’t know how to speak my mind. I wasn’t comfortable enough to say, ‘Umm, I don’t like that idea.’ [With Ray], we can say anything and read each other, and if we’re offended for five minutes, it goes away. I know he has my 100% best interest at heart.”

* Crystal Lewis and Avalon play tonight at Calvary Church, 1010 N. Tustin Ave., Santa Ana. 7:30 p.m. $14.95-$19.95. (714) 673-6701.