Former Nickelodeon star Steve Burns still wants a seat at the kids’ table 15 years after he abruptly left the hit show “Blue’s Clues.”
The 43-year-old, who cut his teeth on acting by playing the quirky, mystery-solving owner of a blue cartoon puppy in the ’90s, is now writing and performing music for the pint-sized crowd in the group STEVENSTEVEN.
“I’m real good with kids,” Burns told the Daily News from his Williamsburg home.
Despite not having any of his own, he has plenty of experience talking to children from behind a TV screen and he joked that it’s usually with the help of millions of dollars of production equipment.
His modern single-family house in a predominantly hipster section of Brooklyn was designed and built to his liking and although it is pretty grown-up, it does have a childhood element in one iconic piece of furniture — “The Thinking Chair” from his Nick Jr. days.
“Blue’s Clues” was overwhelmingly popular with the preschool crowd and was even labeled one of the most “successful and ground-breaking” children’s series of all time.
“I think some people think I left to become a musician, that’s not what happened at all, I had always been a musician,” Burns said.
He is slated to take the stage for the first time Sunday afternoon alongside a very adult musical partner — Grammy-winning rocker Steven Drozd, 47, of the Flaming Lips.
The duo met in 2003, a year after Burns left “Blue’s Clues,” when he decided to reach out to longtime Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann to make moves on his first album. Fridmann then asked Drozd if he wanted to help “the guy from ‘Blue’s Clues'” on a few songs for adults and they instantly hit it off.
Burns’ album “Songs for Dustmites” came out in 2003 and then over the course of the next few years the Stevens started tackling their first kids’ album together — inspired by a request from Nickelodeon to write a song for one of its series “Jack’s Big Music Show.”
But singing live for a parent-kid crowd at Brooklyn Bowl is a lot more intimidating than doing it for the small screen, says Burns.
“This is a different thing… entertaining children live is daunting. I am daunted and excited,” he said.
Their album, “Foreverywhere,” which debuted Friday, features 11 songs that are not quite just for kids. The first single off the album “The Unicorn and Princess Rainbow” has hints of David Bowie and Neil Diamond and is complete with a psychedelic guitar solo.
“It was a little bit of rebelling against the clichés of what makes kiddie music, kiddie music,” Burns explained. “What age group is ‘Puff the Magic Dragon for?” he questioned. “I don’t know.”
“We both don’t think there’s a huge difference anyway in what makes music awesome for kids and what makes music awesome for adults,” he continued.
Drozd, who has two children of his own, explained that the kid part of the album isn’t necessarily the music, but what Burns is trying to get across.
“It’s what you’re saying, and how you re explaining certain things, and certain things that make it — “oh oh now I’m pooping in the toilet bowl,'” he told The News, referencing some of the song lyrics.
“If you’re an adult and that’s really moving you, then you got some other things to worry about,” Drozd joked.
Burns quickly chimed in: “I disagree, our criteria was … if we’re writing a funny song it has to be funny to us, and if we’re writing an inspiring song about loss and longing it has to move us.”
Burns hasn’t appeared on screen for a television show since. In fact, he never intended to in the first place. He thought his “Blue’s Clues” audition was for a voice-over role.
“I just wasn’t paying attention,” he said of his 1995 audition.
But he admits there was no bad blood when he left the show, even though many people speculated he died.
“Those rumors persist and began because it’s a cheap fun joke, it’s fun to corrupt something that is so seemingly pure,” he explained, sharing that he was bummed out that negativity surrounded the positive show.
“The worst one is that someone said I died in a Dodge Charger … and I would never drive a Charger,” he laughed.
Turns out, Burns just outgrew the show.
“It was nothing dramatic, I just felt like I was done,” he said.
“I kind of inhabited this vague older brother space and I was just getting older, I was losing my hair — that really was part of it — my hair was going fast, I kind of looked at my pants and thought the people that gave me the pants aren’t going to give me a wig with any dignity.”
