POP MUSIC REVIEW : Marc Cohn Makes It Personal : The singer-pianist puts grit and emotion into a three-ovation Coach House performance that is passionate, soulful, funny and flawlessly executed.

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  It doesn’t much happen like this anymore, where a new guy pops on the scene full blown with all the things that matter: the songs, the voice, the delivery and the charisma.

While a good shout removed from the impact of Springsteen rolling into town in the early ‘70s--this is the ‘90s after all, how much can you expect?--Marc Cohn didn’t need a publicist to say he’d arrived at the Coach House on Sunday.

In his first of two sold-out shows, the singer-pianist fleshed out songs from his debut album--mischievously titled “Marc Cohn”--with a 95-minute, three-ovation performance that was passionate, soulful, funny and flawlessly executed. Songs that seem all-too-serious and a tad slick on the album were no less serious live, but their gravity seemed justified by the grit and emotion he put into their delivery.

What Cohn does isn’t especially fresh. His keyboard approach is an appealing blend of Bruce Hornsby’s muscularity and Randy Newman’s sense-of-wonder chordings. Along with appropriating Springsteen’s old beard, Cohn writes lyrics that sometimes are as top-heavy as Springsteen’s were early on, where their loaded import overwhelms their intended intimacy. And more than anything, Cohn sings, writes and arranges like a less-robust, less-traveled version of British folk eclectic John Martyn. Like Martyn, Cohn has a limited but tremendously effective voice, deep and rough but with sweet upper harmonics ringing his notes like a halo.

Whatever his sources, this Cleveland-born New York resident still makes his songs and performance personal. Backed only by his own keyboards and guitarist Jeff Pevar--excellent at both New-Agey atmospherics and slashing Ry Cooder-like slide--Cohn burned through 15 songs, including two versions of his hit “Walking in Memphis,” a vision of rebirth in that ghost-filled city where so much of rock was born.

His first take on the song early in the set stripped it of the album’s cumbersome band arrangement, and his solo piano and fervent voice made it seem less mere clever wordplay and more a tale of personal discovery. Rather than try to cap that moment later in the show, he left it largely to the audience to sing the show-closing reprise; Cohn got one exuberant gentleman to sing one of the verses, which he did well enough to get his own little ovation.

Between Memphises, Cohn filled the set with extended workouts on his album songs, covers including Willie Dixon’s “29 Ways” and Little Willie John’s “Fever” (with Pevar on bass providing the sole instrumental support) and a pair of unrecorded songs: “Goin’ Nowhere Fast” and “Rest for the Weary.” The latter, a moving ballad about laying down one’s burdens at life’s end, was dedicated to his father.

His father also was the focus of one of Cohn’s best-realized songs, “Silver Thunderbird,” in which he uses humor and an encapsulating automobile to evoke the mystery of dad-ness: “Great big fins and painted steel / Man it looked just like the Batmobile / With my old man behind the wheel.”

Cohn’s best songs Sunday were the unabashedly romantic “Dig Down Deep” and “True Companion,” both about the heightened reality and focused idealism love can bring. On the former, he sang: “While everyone else is just walking around in their sleep / Let’s dig down deep,” and on stage, Cohn does a bit of that digging himself. While his album suggests a potential for Billy Joel-like slickness, his performance argues that he could be one of the honest, emotional voices we need in this decade. Cohn is scheduled to return to the Coach House on Dec. 21.

Opener Maura O’Connell has a pure, powerful voice that mixes country inflections with some of the folk sonorities of her native Ireland. That voice wasn’t as potent as it might have been on all nine cover tunes she sang, for O’Connell seemed to approach some of her songs line by line, letting neither a narrative flow nor emotional effect build.

There were fabulous exceptions, though. On the Nanci Griffith/Rick West song “Trouble in the Fields,” the hardships (“when the bankers swarm like locusts”) and enduring love of a farming couple were illustrated by O’Connell with a voice full of ache and hope. Her only backing in the show was provided by acoustic guitarist Dave Francis, and the pair shined on an unrecorded torch ballad, “Love to Learn,” with O’Connell’s voice shading from a hush to a saturated glory on the chorus.