"It's important to note that during this interview I am entirely enshrouded in tinfoil. Aluminum foil."

Steve Burns is sitting across from me at a table in a bar in Brooklyn, and he's lying: He's not enshrouded in tinfoil. It's about seven in the evening, the middle of the week, and we're both working on our second beers. I keep blowing cigarette smoke in his face, but he's unperturbed; he hasn't smoked for five years, he says, and it just doesn't affect him anymore. The jukebox in the bar is blasting "Can't Truss It" by Public Enemy, and Steve nods his head. "They," he says with confidence, "have aged extremely well."

In a few hours, I'm going to be pleasantly drunk, listening to unreleased Flaming Lips songs on Steve's handy laptop, having a hell of a time in another bar down the road a bit.

Until then, however, I'm trying to keep my tape recorded steady on the table between us, as I quiz the man before me -- short, slim, and bearded, with an almost bug-eyed mad-scientist earnestness about him -- about how exactly the host of Blue's Clues, arguably the most popular Children's television show in America (if you're uninformed, ask a handy preschooler about Steve and Blue; you'll most likely get a five-year-old's impression of a Beatles fan circa 1965 as a response) decides to chuck it all after six years and enlists the help of various members of the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev to record Songs for Dustmites, his spectacular (and as yet unreleased) debut album. How exactly does a man make the strange lateral move from being a god to children everywhere to being a rock god?

"At the moment, let's get this straight, I am an aspiring rock godlet. I am currently just an ex-children's show host." He chuckles and takes a sip of his beer.

"I worked on Blue's Clues for about six years. I recorded five seasons. I had signed for up to five years, the terms of my contract, and made the difficult decision to move on. I really could have done that for the rest of my life. It's like anything else: I thought that was a fascinating job, an amazing job, and looking back, it's the most rewarding gig a human being can have, because I worked for children. And I can't even get into it. I have to think of more ways to eloquently discuss what it means to work for kids like that. It's beyond cool -- it's uber-cool. There's cool, and then there's working for kids, which is even better."

The decision to retire from his day job, though, neatly dovetailed with the renewal of a lifelong interest: playing music ("I've been playing guitar since I was 13, and I had shitful, shitful, terrible, unforgivable bands"), and the discovery of an album that would focus his ambitions: the Flaming Lips' modern classic The Soft Bulletin.

"It wouldn't be accurate to say I was a fan of the Flaming Lips, though. It would be accurate to say that I was an utter, raving zealot about The Soft Bulletin and I had really never heard anything like that before.  It is so stunning in a ridiculous way.  I think the last time I freaked out that hard about the way something sounded is when I heard 'How Soon Is Now.' I was at a party in the summer of '99. Somebody put on 'Race for the Prize' -- I heard less than two minutes of it and I left the party and bought the record. however long it took me to find whoever put on the record and ask, 'What is this?' I went out and bought the record, went home and listened to it, and I freaked out. I was like 'Oh my God!' I was on the floor. I was literally on the floor. It's a true story."

You hadn't even waited to hear the second song?

"Nope. But anyhow, I freaked out. What are they doing? This was also around the time that I was rediscovering music personally. It's always what I did before Blue's Clues, but the show kept me so busy that I really didn't have time to pick up a guitar. And then I got a Macintosh G4 and started wailing on it. It's weird. When I was 14 I used to pick up my brother-in-law's bass guitar and, having no idea how to play it, just beat the hell out of it until I sounded like Fugazi. I realized that with a computer it's exactly the same thing; with ProTools or any number of programs, you can intuitively beat the hell out of it until you sound like the Boards of Canada. You can do that. It's possible. It was right around the time that I was doing that. I had crazy sonic landscape on my brain. So I found that record and decided to research the band a little bit, and I saw them live ... and I saw that guy up there with a gong. And puppets. And I said, "Oh no, That's what I gotta do. I have to do that now."

"I had always felt that music was a main focus of my life before I moved to New York six years ago. I stepped off the bus and into Blue's Clues. So then I made a couple of phone calls. I never thought of making a record, really. I just had a bunch of crappy songs that I had done in my bedroom. And I let some people hear it, and one of these guys was a manager-type guy and I let him hear it and he said, "Surprisingly, you don't suck." And he had some phone numbers. I got David Fridmann's phone number and I called him and said, 'Listen, what are the odds that I can come up to your studio and see if I can make any of this stuff sound as though Godzilla were playing the drums?" It worked out."

Oh yeah? That easy?

He laughs. "Well ... it turned out that he had a Blue's Clues birthday party the week before I called him. I talked to Dave on the phone and said that I was a huge Flaming Lips fan, and I kind of discussed with him the kind of sounds that I was looking for, so he said that he would talk to Steven [Drozd], find out if he was around, and see if he could get him to work with me on this stuff. David played it for him and Steve said 'Yeah, I got a couple of ideas.'"

"There was a slight 'Is this gonna work?' period that lasted about 30 seconds. We just kind of clicked, you know? That's the big cherry breaker right there, when I first met Drozd, I swear it was within ten minutes that we were laughing like a couple of eighth graders, sitting around and telling really awful jokes. me and Steven just literally sat down, college dorm room-style -- I had an acoustic guitar and he had that one crazy keyboard that he did The Soft Bulletin on -- we sat down and pretty much had all the arrangements down.

"Michael Ivins [the bassist of the Flaming Lips] engineered it. He engineered four of the songs. Steven played on six of them. I have 11 songs now, but I've got ideas for so many more that I would really love to collaborate on with at least David and hopefully with Steven and Michael. I know I can work with them again. I was definitely well compensated for being on Blue's Clues, but not like other people assume. I'm not complaining about my finances, but it would be nice to do it again with OPM [Other People's Money], as it were. It's all been very recent. I might have Steven back in New York, we've recorded in Buffalo. There's talk of having him back to do a couple more tracks, but he's getting very busy, obviously. here in New York I recorded at a place called Murmur Music with a friend of mine named Mike Rubin. I did six songs with hum, but maybe more later."

The resulting labelless album is called Songs for Dustmites, a work still in progress that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve without being a dull slave to them. The lips' influence is up there in front, smiling in its gap-toothed glory, but Burns' Bowie obsession is there, too (he says he tries to listen to Hunk Dory at least once a day lately), as are psychedelic hints of his kids' show days. It's beautiful and it's bombastic; it's tender and sweet, bubblegum music for the Butthole Sufers/Stephen Hawking set. It's an album about finding your place in the world and never losing sight of the wonder of it all, for good or ill. I point out to Steve that in that sort of wry optimism, he shares a common trait with the Lips.

"Yeah," he agrees. "But the Flaming Lips are much more eloquent than I could ever be. But yes, you're right. They're songs about science and love. It's majestic space rock. But not all of it's like that. I'm just into dynamics in general. That's something I used to do with Blue's Clues. In order to get kids to pay attention, I'd talk really quiet ... and then talk really loudly! That fluctuation is an important thing to help get kids to pay attention and I think that that theory holds musically as well. I appreciate dramatic dynamics in music, in theater, in film. And that's not just within a song, it's from song to song. Some songs are extremely quiet and simple, and some are like 'Mighty Little Man': I am a mighty little man, It's about empowerment. You almost hate to tell people what you wrote songs about, but the premise of the songs about, but the premise of the song is like 'What's the next great discovery? What's the next amazing, world-changing, paradigm-shifting thing?"

"I need songs with major chords. I feel positive about things, and I think you can scream positive things and make them powerful. It doesn't always have to be sad. It's almost easier to ask the big questions and come up with sad answers than it is to ask the big questions and find a hopeful idea."

"And there's a couple of songs on the record that are phenomenal makeout songs," he adds with a slight grin. "Half the songs are about nanotechnology and string theory, but if you find the right girl, she might be into it."

He shrugs and finishes his beer.

"I just want to do it again. If I'm good at anything, it's in a live situation. As an actor, I was always much better in theater. That's the drug I love, holding a moment in front of people. It's really important to me and I understand that. I miss that. What could be better than that? I always promised myself that if I ever play live, I have to bite the head off of a Steve doll -- from Blue's Clues."