The closets in Linda Eder’s North Salem home hold many gowns: gowns for special occasions and gowns for evenings out.

There are gowns for the shows the Minnesota native has been singing for decades, shows that celebrate the American Songbook.

Eder will wear one of those gowns Saturday to lend her support to the Tarrytown Music Hall at its first-ever gala fundraiser. She’ll likely sing songs from her last album, an all Judy Garland CD titled “By Myself.”

There may be some Barbra Streisand and some Broadway show tunes.

But Eder’s closet holds its share of jeans, too.

Her latest CD – the country-pop “The Other Side of Me” – is so close to the real-life Linda Eder that it could easily be titled “Be Myself.”

Linda Eder’s not in Kansas anymore.

Eder first hit it big when she was a multiple winner on “Star Search,” the TV talent competition hosted by Ed McMahon.

Soon enough, she was on Broadway, playing Lucy in “Jekyll & Hyde,” which was written by her husband, composer Frank Wildhorn. The couple divorced in 2004 and have a son, Jake.

Eder says that the breakup, and her new relationship, make turning the page musically almost inevitable.

Nearly all of the dozen songs on “The Other Side of Me” are new compositions, including one by Eder herself, titled “Waiting for the Fall.”

That song, in 4 minutes and 16 seconds, takes Eder as far from “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” as she can get. It starts with a great guitar lick and has an edgy vibe that sounds like Bonnie Raitt had a hand in it. (She didn’t.)

The lyric begins:

“It was one of those nights

And now the silence in my room is deafening.”

Later in the song, a backup singer raps along as Eder croons above it all.

If “The Other Side of Me” represents, well, the other side of Eder, she’s not ready to close the American Songbook anytime soon.

“I don’t intend to stop the gown shows,” she says. “Even though the new album is more innately me, for 20 years I’ve been singing the other kind of music and I’ve become good at it. I still love those songs.”

Still, it might make for some confusion among her fans who would be justified to wonder which Eder is showing up.

“I call myself the real Hannah Montana,” she says, referring to the Disney character played by Miley Cyrus, “because I’m doing two totally different shows. One is the jeans show, because I get to wear jeans on stage, and the other is the gown show.”

For the record, Saturday’s gala is a gown show, one with which she’s familiar, but one that’s not really who she is.

“It’s a bit like doing theater for me,” Eder says of the gown shows, “because I always feel like I’m playing a bit of a role, the role of a diva, or that entertainer.

“She isn’t me off-stage, but I love it and I don’t want to stop doing it.”

Eder says she can’t be entirely sure if she’s ever been to Tarrytown Music Hall – a venue saved from the wrecking ball and lovingly restored by Berthold and Helen Ringeisen and The Friends of the Mozartina, and managed by Karina Ringeisen.

“I’ll know as soon as I see the dressing room,” Eder says, explaining that her pre-show routine is that of an entertainer.

“I always come in through the stage doors and I always go to the dressing room. I never see the fronts of the theaters or even the lobbies. I never see it from the hall. I just see the dressing rooms and I see out from the stage.

“But I’m happy to hear that they’ve saved it. I hate it when musical theaters get torn down,” she says.

If they were torn down, she wouldn’t have anywhere to wear her gowns.

But she’d still have her jeans.

Linda Eder

Where: Tarrytown Music Hall, 13 Main St., Tarrytown.

When: 7 p.m. Saturday

Tickets: $45, $65 and $85 for the performance; $140 for the post-performance gala reception at the Doubletree Hotel Tarrytown only; $225 premium tickets include performance and gala reception.

Call: 877-840-0457.

Web: http://tickets.tarrytownmusichall.org.