Pop Music Reviews : Cheryl Wheeler: Will Rogers With a Guitar

Calling Cheryl Wheeler a singer-songwriter doesn’t quite describe the picture. With a portfolio of songs that make their points with a trenchant blend of humor and pathos, she seems more like a Will Rogers with a guitar, or a Mark Twain with a built-in rhythm section.

Wheeler’s performance at the Roxy on Tuesday introduced her new Capitol Records album “Circles and Arrows”--her first outing on a major label. Despite Dan Seals’ country-chart success with her song “Addicted,” her own career has never quite broken through to the larger audience.

Maybe she’s just too real: determinedly unglamorous, ever eager to poke fun at herself. Her off-the-cuff, humorous lead-ins to the songs were as often telling as the songs themselves, balancing the interior emotions of ballads like “Arrow” against such topical commentaries as her razor-sharp swipe at the NRA.

Totally without guile or subterfuge, her music roved across the American landscape, pointedly describing a world in which everyday lives and events achieved the stark clarity of black and white photographs. In Wheeler’s eyes, “Little Kids” can be obnoxious, “Junk Food” is worth the calories and the chemicals, “Neighbors” age with quiet dignity, and an “Estate Sale” entails the pleasures of “going through dead people’s houses.”

Like all Wheeler’s performances, it was an evening that provoked the mind as much as it moved the emotions. In an age of manufactured techno-pop, she reminds us of the simple pleasures of grass-roots reality.