Steve Burns used to make his living as the television sidekick of an animated blue dog. The job entailed, among other things, breaking into a goofy dance whenever the mailman arrived and engaging in long, pregnant pauses while searching for an answer to simple questions. For six years, the fresh-faced and admirably patient Mr. Burns was the only live human to appear in every episode of Blue’s Clues, and thus he became a minor deity to the preschool set.

Now Mr. Burns has put that experience behind him and returned to the vocation he was pursuing before children’s-TV stardom intervened: composing and performing pop songs for a slightly maturer audience. The profile gained from his time on Blue’s Clues—coupled, no doubt, with the major-league money one assumes he received for his efforts—helped him recruit a few ringers. Mr. Burns’ debut album, Songs for Dustmites (PIAS America), features three men normally associated with those lovable neopsychedelic crackpots, the Flaming Lips: drummer Steven Drozd, bassist Michael Ivins and producer Dave Fridmann.

You can understand why a band that named its last full-length CD Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots would want to work with someone of Mr. Burns’ pedigree: The concept’s too off-the-wall to resist. But off-the-wall concepts can easily lead to off-your-head reality, and I must admit the words "self-indulgent vanity project" lingered in my mind as I prepared to listen to Songs for Dustmites. Luckily, what I heard was something else entirely: one of the most pleasant musical surprises of 2003 so far.

It turns out that Mr. Burns is a gifted songwriter with a knack for simple but effective melodies and self-deprecating wit (the key line of the infectious "What I Do on Saturday" is "I’m just a boring example of everybody else"). He’s got the courage to call a song "Troposphere," and the skill to give it an airborne chorus to match. And though his voice is nothing special, it captures the spirit of these tunes perfectly: a little raw, a little geeky, but ready to take on the world.

Messrs. Fridmann, Ivins and Drozd, meanwhile, do their best to turn each selection into a symphony, piling on strings, horns, cacophonous percussion and—on the opening track, "Mighty Little Man"—pounding, speaker-busting synthesized bass. The result isn’t that far removed from a Flaming Lips record, and the wall of sound sometimes threatens to eclipse the front man’s personality. But to his credit, it never does. Songs for Dustmites suggests that the Kermit the Frog–level crossover move is within Mr. Burns’ grasp.