Over the course of music history, there's been a strong contingent of bands making beautifully melodic pop music with a bit of an edge, but not enough of an edge to ever really get the attention they deserve. If guitars aren't being wrecked, people tend to take the music for granted. The classic example, of course, is Big Star - a band whose first album came fully formed and utterly ignored, whose second album ratcheted up the grit (but remained largely unheard), and whose third and final album was a fascinating catastrophe.

Big Star, and Alex Chilton in particular, was a band driven to madness by a nation turning a blind eye to some of the purest pop music around. In typical fashion, Big Star were ignored in their time, but later discovered by several generations of power pop acts that valued haunting harmonies and indelible hooks over chunky guitars and arena anthems.

Blue Skies for Black Hearts is such a band. Formed 13 years ago, this Portland group began as a solo project for recording studio engineer Pat Kearns.

"This is back in the day when Pro Tools wasn't so readily available," says Kearns. "So, I would carry this half-inch reel-to-reel tape deck from studio to studio, that I was working on, and convince some of the musicians to stay and hang out with me after the sessions were over and work on my stuff. That's how the first Blue Skies for Black Hearts record was made. Since then, with releasing records and promoting them, the band has fallen into a more stable lineup."

Marked by cleanly chiming guitars and sweet harmonies, Blue Skies for Black Hearts have always been unequivocally the vision of Kearns. From the winsome horns of "Deck of Cards" to the doo-wop shimmy of "Caroline Make Up Your Mind" to the driving Strokes vibe of "Damn Those Girls," Kearns never seems anything other than in complete control of his voice and his style.

"I like a lot of different kinds of music," says Kearns. "Power pop's kind of a wide genre and I feel that, as far as that definition goes, we fall more on the Big Star end and the Teenage Fanclub end of power pop than, I mean, people lump in Green Day and stuff like that. We definitely fall more on the pretty side of guitars. I think we have more in common with bands like Badfinger, musically. Some of the post-Beatles stuff."

Besides what those bands have in common, musically, they also tend to share lyrical sensibilities. Typically, there's a sensitivity and lovelorn quality to the words that mirrors the shimmering beauty of the guitars. It follows, then, that Blue Skies for Black Hearts would have a similarly personal feel in their lyrics. I asked Kearns if that's him in the words, or if that's an invention.

"I don't like to answer that question," laughs Kearns. "Songs do come from a personal spot, but once I've made the song, it's not really important where it came from. When other people hear it, they bring their own meanings to it, their own experiences. I love it when a song that I've written, that I play, becomes somebody else's song, because it means something to them. And I don't like to say too much, because it can ruin that moment for somebody.

"There's something magic going on; it's part of the process. I don't feel that I'm a hundred percent conscious and aware of what I'm writing, so sometimes the same thing - where a listener will experience something - they'll tell me about it and I'll realize that's what I was writing all along."

It's this emotional universality that enables bands like Blue Skies for Black Hearts to find lovers of pristine pop even decades down the line.

BLUE SKIES FOR BLACK HEARTS, w/ A Leaf, Brite Lines and The Stravinsky Riots, 8 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 5, Bob's Java Jive, 2102 South Tacoma Way, Tacoma, $5, 253.475.9843