WHEELER’S SONGS HAVE IT BOTH WAYS

Cheryl Wheeler likes to have things both ways, which is a good thing since there’s no way to describe her approach to music without resorting to such hybrid terminology as folk/rock and singer/songwriter.

It’s no wonder that she likes to call her music “slash,” after the punctuation mark that pops up in all the descriptions.

In a time when most members of the once-prevalent singer/songwriter cadre have shifted either toward new-age mellow on one side or harder-edged rock on the other, Wheeler (who plays At My Place in Santa Monica on Thursday) goes right down the middle with a soft-rock sound that, as that term implies, is part one thing and part the other.

“I love singing loud and carrying on,” she said during a phone interview from the rural Swansea, Mass. house she shares with a friend and five dogs, a cat and an African gray parrot.

But just as her childhood love of rockers like Buddy Knox (of “Party Girl” fame) was tempered by an attraction to such folksters as Ian and Sylvia and Joan Baez, so are her current preferences.

“I don’t want to be a big loud act,” she insisted. “I don’t like amplifying so loud you can’t even talk to anybody. I’m constantly admonishing the band to play quieter.”

She won’t have to worry about that at At My Place--she’ll be performing as a solo acoustic act, as she did at the same club last February. But with or without her band, Wheeler is getting good reviews both for her debut album “Cheryl Wheeler” and for concerts that have elicited comparisons to such classic singer/songwriters as Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor.

Where the mantle of singer/songwriter seems to be in disfavor these days, Wheeler wears it proudly, arguing that it’s wrong to view the term as archaic.

“If you say ‘singer/songwriter’ nobody thinks of Prince, but why not?” she asked. “He’s a great singer and a great songwriter.”

But true to her having-it-both-ways form, Wheeler hangs on to the label yet downplays one of the elements once associated with it: confessional self-expression.

“I write a lot of ballads, and those are really emotional, but you don’t always want to be like that when you write,” she said.

“Everybody says it’s really great to have freedom of expression, but it’s not always so great. If you write songs like I do there are no rules, there’s not anybody to (guide you). I’ve been writing since I was 17 and I’m 35 now, and sometimes I think I’ll never have anything to write about the rest of my life. It’s nice to have some rules now and then.”

In fact, one of Wheeler’s latest compositions is anything but a vehicle for emotional expression: a commissioned theme for a proposed television sitcom.

“It’s fun to be told what to write about,” she said of the experience, adding that one of her desires is to write songs for a stage musical.

“Sometimes I’ll have a million musical ideas, but I can’t think of anything worth saying. If somebody tells you to write a song about something, you don’t have to decide whether it’s worth writing about. They think it is, so you just write it.”