A personal performance

Young Chang

Leslie Claussen can’t quite understand it herself.

This folk-rock singer is wary of giving out information online and

won’t reveal much about her personal life to the media. Yet Claussen, who

performs today in Costa Mesa, will dig up, write about and sing aloud her

innermost emotions and memories.

About being abused by her stepfather as a child, and how that

experience twisted her definition of love for a time.

About having an alcoholic mother who left home and then died while

away, without saying goodbye.

About having her disabled grandmother take Claussen, her five

siblings, two cats and an Irish setter into her home.

And she also sings about random nameless neighbors in her building.

It’s not a sad song, and it’s not a happy one. It’s just a long thought

about how strange it is that there can be so many people, so far apart.

Claussen, 36, insists she doesn’t exclusively write sad songs. And if

her lyrics are at times sad, they’re as much about transcending grief as

the grieving itself. Because who wants to listen to a depressing song?

Claussen knows she doesn’t want to write one. That would defeat her

purpose.

“By saying these things, you kind of resolve them,” she said. “Writing

it down helps me to get through it; and listening to it, I hope, will

help someone else get through it.”

As painfully shy as she used to be, the Playa del Rey

singer/songwriter will remember her goal when she’s in the spotlight

today at Borders Books, Music & Cafe at South Coast Plaza. She’ll recall

that regardless of how she looks and feels, it’s the musical message that

will either flop or win big with the local audience.

So far she’s had reason to be hopeful. Claussen has already faced her

most difficult critics: kids.

During an 18-month involvement with the Grammy in the Schools Program,

she visited Los Angeles high schools and performed for the students. They

didn’t quiet down at first, no matter how much the teacher told them to.

But once she started playing, the drone died out and students shushed

each other.

“If they think you’re kidding them, they get impatient,” Claussen said

about the teen audience.

When it comes to lyrics, though, Claussen doesn’t kid.

It’s all about that one specific but carefully chosen detail that

might be familiar. It’s about the emotion you thought no one else felt

but now you hear from someone else’s mouth.

And it’s about telling the truth and meaning it, rather than spouting

generalities you know nothing about.

Children and other listeners have been touched by Claussen’s lyrics

because they come straight from the journal she carries wherever she

goes. For instance, the song titled “Neighbors” -- describing a woman

next-door whom Claussen doesn’t know -- came to her one day when she was

journal writing.

Her first album, “Sketchbook,” features a self-portrait on the cover

and is a three-fold reference, partly to her journal. The name also

derives from the acoustic style of music -- tunes recorded live, with

flaws.

“They’re more of a sketch,” she explained.

Even her siblings, who could’ve reacted to Claussen’s honest music

with reprimands for airing family ghosts, are moved by their sister’s

words.

“Stars,” a track about losing loved ones and suggesting each star in

the sky must be for a person lost, means the most to sister Valerie

Claussen-Huth. It includes the following lines:

“There’s a star for my mother, she never could stay; a star for my

father, I wish I knew more than his name. ... There’s a mist on the

water, tears on the sand, I stand under starlight with one reaching

hand.”

Claussen-Huth said she sometimes pops in her sister’s compact disc and

just listens, because it heals her. She thinks the songs are heartfelt

and from no other place but her sister’s soul.

“There’s nothing you can’t like about that,” Claussen-Huth said.

Yes, the subjects are, at times, dark and mournful. The rhythms are,

at times, more pensive than upbeat.

But Claussen never writes anything hateful, never even anything angry,

Claussen-Huth said on the phone from Sacramento.

“It’s very difficult, the things she has gone through. But if you

really listen to the way she writes it, it’s more [feeling] remorse for

what other people have done to her,” Claussen-Huth said, “And maybe

regret for things that happened.”

FYI

* What: Folk-rock singing by Leslie Claussen

* When: 7 p.m. today

* Where: Borders Books, Music & Cafe South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bear St.,

Costa Mesa

* Information: (714) 556-1185