MOMENTS OF CLARITY, CHAOS AND LIGHT : Peter Himmelman Has Pledged to Write About the Things That Matter

Peter Himmelman isn’t the sort of rock musician you’d expect to provide an evening’s light entertainment--unless, that is, he brings his crayons.

Playing a solo show at Bogart’s a few years back, the Minnesota native passed out paper and Crayolas to the audience and solicited drawings, poems, concert reviews and any other feedback the crowd might care to give. The resulting mood of bantering, almost collegial informality between artist and audience offset the unrelenting seriousness of Himmelman’s songs.

On “Impermanent Things,” from his 1991 album, “Strength to Strength,” Himmelman prayed for the wisdom not to be tempted and sidetracked by things that don’t matter. That prayer must have been at least partly answered, because on his new release, “Flown This Acid World,” Himmelman has come up with songs that beautifully capture some of the life-cycle events that matter to everyone.

“Raina,” named for the singer’s daughter, is a lullaby, but also an ode to the power of new birth to radiate hopefulness in the face of pervasive cynicism.

“Cross This Bridge” is a wedding song, lovely in its graceful melody and its tone of simple affirmation: “Let’s cross this bridge together, let’s walk across the river of time/I will cherish you forever, like a diamond our love will shine.”

“Child Into a Man” is an offering of love and thanks to parents: “I used to criticize your every move, but you just led me by the hand/You never wavered once as I painfully grew, from a child into a man.”

Himmelman is hardly oblivious to the chaos that swirls around these moments of clarity and light. Several songs portray love that has become strained to the breaking point. The opening tracks, “Flown This Acid World” and “Beneath the Damage and the Dust,” paint visions of social or personal collapse. In the first, Himmelman imagines himself beggared but in some sense mystically fulfilled and transported; in the second, he returns from his transcendent escape to shoulder the burden of rebuilding the shattered life of another.

At the album’s end, in a taut, powerful, eight-minute epic called “Untitled,” Himmelman, a Jew, is forced to confront not just death, but a bigot’s attempt to desecrate his own cherished dead. It’s a song about the Holocaust and its legacy--the only rock song I’m aware of that grapples meaningfully with this daunting subject.

Himmelman, 32, emerged in 1980 with Sussman Lawrence, a power-pop band that toured and released two albums without landing a record deal. In 1985, Himmelman billed himself as a solo artist while keeping the same group of players who had been in Sussman Lawrence. He was soon launched on a solo recording career that is now on its fifth album. Himmelman and his longtime backup musicians (he has been playing with the same band since his teens, with just one personnel switch on guitar, and the recent addition of a female harmony singer) draw from a sizable box of stylistic crayons, with blues, R&B; and folk-rock turning up in a polished sound that surrounds Himmelman’s grainy, fervent, sometimes Elvis Costello-like voice. On “Flown This Acid World,” Himmelman and band achieve their most direct and authoritative playing.

A commercial breakthrough hasn’t yet arrived: Himmelman may be less widely known for his own work than for having married Maria Dylan, Bob’s oldest child, and turning the bard of the Baby Boomers into a grandpa. Himmelman also is possibly unique among Jewish rock musicians in observing his faith’s most rigorous traditions. He eats only kosher food and keeps the Sabbath, which means no concerts on Friday nights.

While faith and spiritual striving inform many of Himmelman’s songs, they are as non-dogmatic as U2 and Van Morrison’s expressions of Christian belief. One of Himmelman’s most openly religious songs, “Beneath Your Watching Eyes,” is a prayerful ode of divine praise that Amy Grant or Michael W. Smith could perform verbatim for a Christian-pop audience.

Who

Peter Himmelman.

When

Saturday, Nov. 21, at 8 p.m. With Shona Laing.

Where

Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

Whereabouts

San Diego Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit. Left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Plaza.

Wherewithal

$12.50.

Where to call (714) 496-8930.