May as well get this out of the way right now: TBASA is not an acronym. Rather, it's a sort of convenient mashup of one guy's name. Tim Basaraba is a restlessly inventive singer-songwriter, beginning his musical life in Idaho as a punk singer, and subtly merging into a genre-hopping weirdo.

"My dad was a pastor of a Baptist church, and I sang in front of congregations," says Basaraba. "That went to singing with him - him on guitar and my mother on piano - and then I did choir in high school, and then I wanted to be in a rock band. I started a punk band in Idaho, and then I moved over here, thinking I was going to make it big, but then I never did. But, I just kept playing music."

As time went on, Basaraba became more proficient in his musicianship (while he sang in punk bands, he was behind the eight ball when it came to playing instruments). In playing music, his mind began to wander.

"I don't really think of myself as someone that has a genre," says Basaraba. "I just get these notions in my mind of what I want to do, and it seems like if I don't do it, I'll die. That's why there's so much shit on the Internet you could find stuff that I've done that's really terrible. But, it's out there, because I'm able to do it, complete it, record it, and even forget about it, sometimes."

TBASA releases an album once a year, and these albums vary wildly in style, from acoustic singalong to psychedelic excursion to noodling alt-rock. His most recent effort, Don't Say Sucks, is a dance album, for lack of a better word. Including at least one explicit dedication to Miley Cyrus, the album is a slippery dancefloor curiosity, full of full-bodied club-banger beats and offbeat ideas.

"I try to make an album every year, and I hadn't had any ideas at all," says Basaraba. "I had a couple songs going through my mind, acoustically, that I had worked out. They were super depressing carry-overs from the way I had been feeling. I listened to Justin Timberlake's first disc of The 20/20 Experience. Just listening to these 10-minute songs, where the structure was kind of like this great pop song for the first five minutes, and then pop masturbation for the next five. Just him not caring if anyone else liked it, but that he was going to take the risk over the hook and just play on it for another five minutes after the song was done.

"I found myself gravitating toward making some stuff with really dancey beats, my way, and see what happens," says Basaraba. "I ended up recording all these songs, and they were each like ten to fifteen minutes long, and they were terrible, because there was no structure. So, I went back in and remixed them down to your typical three-to-five minute song."

Even with this new batch of dance songs just released a couple months ago, TBASA is already working on new material. Staying in one place is difficult for him. In talking with him, he says that he's recently become fascinated - all over again - with the off-kilter guitar rock of the late '90s, so he's putting away the synthesizers for a moment. With an artist like TBASA, who's so willing to throw everything at the wall, it's hard to ever know what you're going to be getting. The reward is always being surprised by whatever they throw out.

TBASA, w/ Death By Stars, Elbow Coulee, French Letters, 8 p.m., Saturday, March 1, Bob's Java Jive, 2102 South Tacoma Way, Tacoma, $5, 253.475.9843