He’s no longer playing the Blue’s.
The former host of hit kids’ show “Blue’s Clues” will rock Brooklyn Bowl later this month to launch the psychedelic children’s album he created with a member of the Flaming Lips. The album release party for “Foreverywhere” on Feb. 26 will truly be a show for all ages, said the beloved icon of ’90s kids.
“It’s definitely an album for children. It’s also an album for adults. It’s maybe either, but decidedly both,” said Williamsburger Steve Burns, who hosted the popular Nickelodeon show with animated puppy Blue for seven years before calling it quits in 2001.
Steve Burns teamed up with Flaming Lips multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd to form the band “StevenSteven,” and together they wrote the whimsical album over the course of six years. The two drew inspiration from an eclectic range of sources, said Burns, including Dr. Seuss, Queen, Neil Diamond, David Bowie, and Mr. Rogers.
The record opens with a trilogy of songs about a unicorn who falls in love with a guitar-shredding cosmic princess. Its lead single “Unicorn and Princess Rainbow” has a video that features Burns wearing a unicorn horn, while rainbows, hearts, and a glowing Drozd float in the background.
Burns may be best known for singing the world’s happiest song about receiving mail, but his lyrics in “Foreverywhere” have a much more melancholy vibe. He wanted the album to evoke feelings rarely found in tunes aimed at rugrats, he said.
“We wanted to include a lot of emotions that aren’t typically in children’s music, like a sense of quest, yearning, and loss,” he said. “In all children’s music I think that’s the best of all the stuff out there. The Charlie Brown Christmas music and “Puff the Magic Dragon” is an incredibly sad song.”
The Brooklyn Bowl show will be the first time the duo have played the album before a live audience, but Burns said he has already gotten the tick of approval from plenty of fledgling rock critics.
“All of our friends’ kids have heard the songs ad nauseam, at this point the response has been wonderful,” he said.
Still, he says he will be sweating bullets on the night of the show, since kids can sometimes be the toughest crowd.
“I’m sure I’ll be very, very, very nervous. Children in my experience are a very difficult audience — they know right away, they smell your fear. But they’re also the best possible audience too, because they’re so accepting of play in general,” he said.
Since leaving “Blues Clues” Burns has kept busy doing voiceover work and working on his music. But he still has one reminder of his time of the show — he keeps the show’s big red “thinking chair” in his apartment and says that it is a great spot to get some reading done.
“I use it mostly for reading, I’ve got a nice light and it’s super comfy if you fling your legs over the sides of it,” he said.
StevenSteven at Brooklyn Bowl (61 Wythe Ave. at N. 12th St. in Williamsburg, www.brook
