TOM BREIDING

The sound: Acoustic story songs that range from heartfelt post-Stone Pony American rock to gritty porch-front blues.

		A capsule look at Pittsburgh bands making news.

Tom's Back Pages: Now a sideman in Bill Toms' Hard Rain, this Wheeling native also fronts his own band, American Son. He began his recording career in 1992 with "Railroad Town," and has followed it up with a series of acclaimed releases.

This Year's Model: "Guitar and Pen Vol. II" is, as the title would suggest, a sequel to "Guitar and Pen," an earlier collection of Breiding alone on acoustic guitar. The rationale? "These are mostly songs that have been sitting around for a long time and most of them I really liked, but they just never found a place on any of my previous releases."

Nardini's choice: Local blues-rocker Norman Nardini calls the best song on the album, "Fifteen Minutes," Breiding's best song ever. And he may be on to something there. It's his "Summer of '69," a haunting meditation on his childhood dreams. It starts with Breiding and his buddies tossing guitars in the back of his '68 Ford, just trying to stretch their 15 minutes by an hour or two, and ends with the hard-working songwriter wondering why his friends have given up and moved on with their lives while he's still hanging on. It's poignant stuff, and Breiding puts it out there with total conviction.

Why he left it off his other albums: "I didn't know what to do with it," he says. "I wrote it as kind of a rock 'n' roll song and recorded it like that, but it didn't sound good." The idea for this project was to take those songs that didn't sound right with the band and put them out there as they were, in demo form.

Up next: "I've got all these Appalachian songs, old-timey songs that I'm writing that I want to put together. And I've also started writing some real rocking stuff for the band to record." He's also in the studio with Hard Rain. Breiding says, "I love it. I keep telling Bill this is the record I wanted to make when I was 15. Man, it's rockin'. There's not an acoustic guitar on the whole thing."

On the importance of having a band: "I'm writing more of the rock 'n' roll stuff recently," he says. "I've always done that. It's just that a lot of them haven't found their way to records or I've written a lot and never really finished them. Maybe there was no avenue for me to play them at the time. I never really had a band that I could count on until recently."

On why he's just as happy doing the solo acoustic thing: "It's my initial love," he says, "to write a song and just record it and to hear it back as a finished product. There's nothing like that. You start out with a blank piece of paper and a couple hours later, you have this audio that you can listen to. I still love that probably more than anything else I do."

The show: You can catch Breiding Saturday night at the Starlite Lounge where The Threepenny Opry finds Breiding sharing a stage with Jay Hitt, Eve Goodman, Jeff Miller, Howard Davidson & Friends and a rare appearance by the some-would-say reclusive Phil Harris of Hector in Paris. Kickoff is at 8 p.m. The Starlite Lounge is at 364 Freeport Road in Blawnox. 412-828-9842. There is no cover but donations are requested.