Road warrior Joan Armatrading returns to Performing Arts Center

Like dozens of other artists consumed by busy careers, singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading strives to find the right balance between her role as a performer caught up in the grueling schedule of international tours lasting nine months or more, and her work as a songwriter who has put out so many albums over the last four decades that she has lost count.

Making this balancing act more challenging for Ms. Armatrading, who will perform for a second time at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Saturday, is the fact that the two endeavors seem to have become mutually exclusive. Put simply, when she is touring, she finds it impossible to write.

A look at her approach to touring makes this conflict easier to understand. In a telephone interview from the Island of Jersey in the United Kingdom, where she was playing a gig last week, Ms. Armatrading described a daunting performance schedule when she is out on the road. She typically plays four nights in a row and then gets “a day off that is not really a day off because I’m traveling or doing interviews or other things to promote the tour,” and then plays another four consecutive dates.

Asked if this kind of a grind takes a heavy toll, the singer dismissed the notion by pointing out that she had essentially the same performance schedule on similar tours in 2007 and 2008, and signed up for more in 2010.

What about 2009?

“People always ask me that: ‘Why didn’t you tour in 2009?’” she said with a laugh, her clipped diction reflecting an understated British accent without any perceptible traces of her roots in the West Indies, where she was born and lived until the age of 7, when she moved to England. “I’ve got to write, I tell them. That’s what I do, isn’t it?” she continued, with mock resentment. “I’m the one who has to write all these songs.”

Considering that the current tour of Europe, Canada, the United States, Europe again, Australia and New Zealand and back home to the U.K. started in March and will wind up in December, simple arithmetic shows that there isn’t really any time to work on writing new songs. And time is only one of the considerations when Ms. Armatrading reaches out to the muse.

“I have to be in one place and be calm,” the singer said, explaining that her philosophy of songwriting is simple: “I’m primarily trying to write a better song than the last one I wrote,” she said, “to be a better songwriter all the time.”

That objective has carried her through the recording of dozens of albums, although she can’t say exactly how many there have been. “I have no idea,” she confessed, apparently happy not to be weighed down by a number. “People tell me, but I’m not going back to check.” (Including compilations, EPs and live albums, the number tops two dozen.)

Another thing that hasn’t changed over the course of a career that started in the 1970s is the subject matter for her songs. “What I write about is about people: that hasn’t changed,” the songwriter said. “People are continually discovering, and that is what I write songs about.”

Expanding on the notion of discovery, and how it fascinates her, Ms. Armatrading talked about different ways she has experienced it. “I saw a bunch of girls on a train recently,” she said, “and one girl was getting super-excited—enraptured, really—because she had discovered olives. You’d think she had just split the atom or something! That is the power of discovery.

“People are what make the difference, always,” she continued. “You can go to the most beautiful place in the world, but it only comes alive because of people who are there with you, or people you meet.”

Her writing process offers her different kinds of access to musical discovery. “I write on the guitar, I write on the piano; sometimes I start on the guitar and move to the piano,” she said. “Sometimes the words come first, sometimes melody comes first, sometimes the rhythm. Sometimes it’s pop, sometimes it’s rock, it’s blues, it’s jazz.”

The biggest change she has seen in the way she writes and records songs is in the technology. One of the things that has stayed consistent, at least on the last three albums, is that she has stuck with one genre or style through the whole disk. For the most recent album, “This Charming Life,” she characterized the genre as “rock/pop.”

For her show at the PAC, Ms. Armatrading said she will be offering some of her older songs, like “Love and Affection,” along with newer material, including songs from “This Charming Life.”

“I love ‘Love and Affection,’” she said. “It’s the song that got me known all over the world. So I am going to sing it—I sing it at every show. But I am also going to mix in new stuff. That’s what I’ve been doing, and I’ve been getting an incredible response from the audiences.

“I always present new stuff,” she said. “Otherwise, why am I here?”

Joan Armatrading will perform at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Saturday, July 10, at 8:30 p.m. For ticket information, visit whbpac.org, or call 288-1500.