She’s Only Comfortable Speaking on the Record

Lori Carson’s specialty is the plaintive, inward, psychological ballad that explores desperate loneliness or the pain of crumbling romance. But the thought that she might be pegged according to something as obvious as the troubled emotional tenor of her work clearly rankles this folk-pop singer from New York City.

“People who [understand] what I do, I think it gives them joy to hear music that is honest and that they can identify with,” Carson said last week in a phone interview from Dallas, in which she answered most questions in the curt, put-upon tone of a person whose patience is running out.

“I only hear from critics that the work is depressing. From my fans, I hear that it feels really good. I think there’s comfort in beauty and truth.”

Carson, who plays Tuesday at the Coach House with a four-member backing band, also is impatient with those who want to know if she actually went through the pain and turmoil in her songs. To her, such mundane concerns betray a vulgar misunderstanding of what constitutes the deeper core of art.

“It’s upsetting to me to do interviews with people who are coming [from] a place that doesn’t take into account who I am, or what I do,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and I feel like I’m making something because I love doing it and I’m putting it out into the world. It’s as simple as that.”

If Carson’s temperament isn’t geared to suffer the prying media with style and good cheer, she does have a knack for making records good enough to invite the priers’ unwanted inquisitiveness.

Her three solo albums, plus two additional releases as the featured singer of the Golden Palominos (a shifting, ad hoc consortium of musicians working under drummer-producer Anton Fier), showcase an airily pure, delicately fraying voice well-suited to getting inside the hurt of life without false histrionics.

The songs are internal monologues etched with details and unconventional turns of thought that bring fresh immediacy and a welcome touch of elusiveness and uncertainty to that old familiar pop form, the heartache ballad.

Carson, who didn’t want to give her age, grew up on Long Island and moved to Manhattan at 17. She pursued acting and modeling, and studied art and fiction writing. In 1984 she began singing in folk clubs.

Carson started her recording career in 1990 with “Shelter,” a big-budget release on Geffen Records. She had a name producer, Hal Willner, who brought in a string section, a corps of avant-garde leaning players such as bassist Rob Wasserman and guitarist Marc Ribot, and, in Gregg Allman, an unlikely duet partner for a lush, romantic ballad. She now regards her debut album as “a painful learning process, a loss of innocence in terms of my beliefs about what it meant to be an artist.”

Soon, though, Fier recruited her into the Golden Palominos, whose extensive roster of contributors, dating back to 1983, includes Michael Stipe, John Lydon, Richard Thompson, Syd Straw, Matthew Sweet, Bernie Worrell and Jack Bruce.

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Carson sang and wrote lyrics for two ambitious albums. “This Is How It Feels” (1993) stands out as a striking, erotically charged but intellectually rewarding blend of funk, electronic music, whispery declamations and singer-songwriter sensibilities. In today’s dance-leaning climate, it would stand a good chance of becoming a trendy, attention-grabbing release. Instead, it’s a critically hailed cult catalog item.

“Anton is really innovative and is always doing work years ahead of his time,” Carson said. “When I see bands like Portishead or Tricky doing so well, I feel he should have gotten the recognition. But the people who come first don’t necessarily get the recognition. Those records will probably be completely obscure for all time, but we didn’t make them for [commercial] reasons. They were experiments.”

Carson has continued to draw on Fier’s ability as a producer or co-producer for her post-Palominos solo albums, “Where It Goes” (1995) and the recently released “Everything I Touch Runs Wild,” in which she produced most of the tracks herself, recording mainly in the bedroom of her Greenwich Village apartment.

Carson says her association with Fier helped shake her songwriting loose from conventional pop forms and underscored the importance of an art-for-art’s-sake ethic.

“Anton makes [Golden Palominos] records separate from any kind of commercial context or concern with what the world or the music business is doing,” she said. “I found it very liberating to work under those conditions, and recognize that it was possible--that you could do your own work, be true to yourself, and it would find its own place in the world.”

* Lori Carson plays Tuesday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Lu Urquidi opens and Tim Moyer closes. 8 p.m. $10-$12. (714) 496-8930. Also Wednesday at the Roxy, 9009 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 8:30 p.m. $12.75. (310) 278-9457.