Thursday, November 27, 2003 -- STEVE Burns' biggest claim to fame so far is his six-year stint with ''Blues Clues.''

If you know ''Blues Clues'' it's probably because you're under 20, or because you and your child have watched this interactive TV show together, or because your 7-year-old has been usurping your computer at every possible moment so she can play her ''Blues Clues Treasure Hunt'' CD-ROM game on it when you thought you were going to check your email.

The star of ''Blues Clues'' is this blue dog with floppy ears, and the pooch's human co-star used to be Burns, wearing a two-tone green striped shirt and a dead-pan naive expression and obviously possessing some acting talent.

Burns' other talents include songwriting. Since his departure from ''Blues Clues'' he has recorded a critically well-received debut CD and has toured the U.K. with the indie Grammy winners Flaming Lips. Now on his own solo tour, he comes to the Iron Horse a week from tonight with a show that will appeal to indie-pop fans and nanotechnologists of all stripes.

That nanotechnologists part is serious, sort of. Burns says his CD, ''Songs For Dustmites,'' is really all about nanotechnology - ''nanotechnology and love,'' he said on the phone last week from his apartment in Brooklyn - and the title song makes the theme explicit:

Nano you and nano me
Living beside the micron sea
Where all the kids have robot hearts
And dustmites fight with microgears

Another of his songs, ''Superstring,'' is about unified field theory, he said, adding, ''If that won't bring out a rock'n'roll audience I don't know what will.''

Call Burns a pop songwriter, or maybe punk-pop. One of the most interesting things about ''Songs for Dustmites'' is that it invites listeners to renew their understanding of what the word ''pop'' means. (The term has been applied to the music of both Ray Mason and Michael Jackson. If that's not enough to make you wonder about lexicographers.)

''Pop is a cannibalistic thing,'' Burns observed. ''The indie rock world has embraced the world of pop because it can't get away from it. Pop is melodic, deliberately catchy and not ashamed to be so. The definitions are always fluid; five years ago it would have been called alternative rock. It's designed to be palatable. It cares about you, it wants you to like it.''

Burns is highly articulate in conversation, but if you check his Web site (www.steveswebpage.com) you get more visual entertainment than straightforward information. The site includes such things as a photo of a squirrel accompanied by a Yeats poem on the subject, also a bunch of circle-faces. The tech work is quite good, but you don't get a standard musician's bio.

Burns, who calls himself ''sort of a micro-celebrity,'' figures that biographic stuff - raised in Pennsylvania, 30 years old now, etc. etc. - is pretty unimportant. ''Except to journalists,'' he added thoughtfully.

What is important are his media, which include not only the songs but also the visual projections that accompany them. If you're having Trachtenburg Family Slide Show deja vu, you're not alone. ''Anywhere the Trachtenburgs perform, I can perform,'' said Burns after asking his interviewer a few questions about the floor plan of the Iron Horse, where he has never been before.

Burns' band includes himself on guitar, ''a very large aggressive thunderous drummer named Jason Gerken,'' multi-instrumentalist Derek P.B. Brown (who has played with Liz Phair) and probably bassist Sherry Westrich.

''But the real star will be the projection screen,'' Burns added, ''projecting everything from animated dustmites to narrative images of myself being knocked out by Satan, to strange bearded men dancing gleefully in Brooklyn.''

You can see the Satan episode, featuring a beefy guy in a red shirt wearing Viking horns and a bat cape, on the video for Burns' song ''What I Do On A Saturday.'' The other characters are a couple of urban angels with wings, halos, T-shirts and cigarettes.

The song's opening line is, ''I'm just a boring example of everybody else,'' sung beside a wandering guitar under a synthesized cloud of chords and on top of a bass-drum combination that could probably clean sewers.

''I think music has become a visual medium in a lot of ways,'' Burns continued. ''It's an opportunity to deepen whatever it is you're trying to get across in a song.'' Or, as a line from another of his songs, ''Mighty Little Man,'' puts it:

It's everything he's never seen, the biggest deal there's ever been described in light upon the screen.

Burns is still flushed from the success of his tour with Flaming Lips. ''No one in the U.K. has heard of 'Blues Clues,' so I started from zero every night,'' he said. ''And I traveled by intergalactic tour bus there. This (Northeastern tour) will be a markedly different experience. I'm traveling in my own personal Honda Element with a rental van.''

His show on Dec. 4 starts at 7 p.m. $10. 586-8686.