The Wheelhouse

For me songwriting has come to resemble a workshop where I create artifacts using a repeatable process and resulting in results that have a shared identity. 

Wheelhouse

A wheelhouse refers to the protective shack or shelter on a ship where the steering wheel resides.  The wheelhouse is where you guide the ship.  Wheelhouse has also come to mean an area of expertise.  If you have the expertise to do something, then it is "in your wheelhouse."  

A wheelhouse, as I see it, is the gearbox where the wheels of thought turn, the workshop, the place where trusted tools and processes work on new materials to shape and refine.  In my mind I see a miller's grinding floor where a an enormous, un-stoppable horizontal wheel makes flour out of sheafs of wheat or meal out of corn.  The wheel turns slowly but inevitably.  

Once an ideas is in the works, the tools take on part of the job.  The consciousness becomes that of an onlooker, relaxed at not having to understand it all; confident that the process will work. The cranium enlarged like those diagrams of little tool-people inside your mind, sorting, trimming, aligning, stacking, rejecting, all to a tune or rhythm.  The factory floor. Observed and admired from above.

Cosmos

Is a collection of objects and elements, stars bounded by personal experience and taste that have their own gravity. They float and make up a little personal universe.

the song

the chords

the timing and length

the lines

the words

the rhymes

the performance

the instrumentation

the feeling and mood