Music Adventure for Emotions : Guitarist: Tom Verlaine’s multitiered, acoustic sounds are born of dreamlike reverie. He brings his solo act to the Coach House tonight.

In an ideal universe, all rock albums would be entitled “Adventure,” or at least try to live up to that label. To Tom Verlaine, whose seminal ‘70s band Television did indeed claim “Adventure” as the title of its sophomore LP, that’s the whole point of the music. Talking by phone a week ago from his Manhattan apartment, Verlaine said: “It always surprises me when I hear so many bands sounding like so many other bands. I always felt like there was an obligation to either do something fresh--I hate the word different because how different can it be when it’s just three or four chords strung together?--or to do something that somehow was like making something for yourself, really to surprise yourself.”

Through his work with Television and 11 subsequent years dotted with infrequent pulses of brilliance under his own name, the singer-writer-guitarist has created a body of songs that delineates interior emotional landscapes so sharply that they can seem like dreams held in place with a spike.

Using a standard rock instrumentation, Verlaine’s recordings construct multitiered architectures of sound, inhabited by a fearless fret-board style that may be surpassed only by Richard Thompson in shoving the electric guitar beyond the boundaries of musical reason.

In light of his history of amplified excursions, Verlaine’s current move certainly qualifies as adventurous. He is embarked on a solo acoustic tour--appearing tonight at San Juan Capistrano’s Coach House, Wednesday at Bogart’s in Long Beach and Thursday and Friday at McCabe’s in Santa Monica--with intentions of issuing an acoustic album later this year. But while it may seem at odds with practically everything he has put on record, the acoustic side is nothing new to Verlaine.

“All the songs in the last bunch of years are written on acoustic (guitar), and I started playing acoustic shows in ’85 in Europe a bit,” he said, “It just had a certain appeal to me. Maybe it’s an intimacy factor. It really puts you into your voice. And it actually puts you into your body in a way that electric music doesn’t. You would think electric music would because of the big beat and all that, but acoustic just does something else. It’s a mystery to me, but it’s something I like to hear and do.”

Verlaine’s legendary instrumental flights would seem difficult to accomplish outside of a band context, but he has a simple way around that: “I just don’t really play solos in the acoustic bit. I never set out to be a lead guitar player. It’s more just the songs. That’s the irony of all this--because the records are so filled with electric stuff--the melody stuff is what I’ve always been keen on.”

He said very little of his older catalogue translates to the solo setting, but that it does afford him a chance to do ballad material such as “The Scientist Writes a Letter” and “Without a Word” that previously found no place in his shows.

He initially wanted to do an acoustic album in 1984, but the idea was turned down by his record label in Britain (Phonogram). That proved to be the least of his troubles with a label A&R; man, who, Verlaine claims, refused to issue one completed album and grievously remixed and delayed his last two releases, “Flash Light” and “The Wonder.” The latter album, recorded in 1988, wasn’t issued in Europe until earlier this year and remains unreleased in the United States. Now free from his Phonogram contract, he says a pair of labels have expressed interest in the acoustic album.

If Verlaine’s songs seem to be born of a dreamlike reverie, that isn’t far from the actual source of many of them. “Pillow” on “The Wonder” is a haunting lullaby made up of fragmentary scenes from a relationship, some observed by a dove outside the couple’s window.

Explaining that perspective in the song, Verlaine said: “A lot of the ideas I get seem to be when I’m falling asleep at night. As I’m falling asleep I often hit this place where sometimes I can remember and sometimes I can’t, but something goes on there. And sometimes it’s literally like there’s a bird there that you’re having a conversation with. I know that sounds completely ridiculous. Often there’s music there as well.

“If I can wake myself out of it, or generally I kind of double up out of it--it’s a weird state--I’ll go to the tape deck and hum a melody, then fall asleep, and the next day I’ll hear it back and it’ll bring back some of that.”

A Wilmington, Del., native, Verlaine had his musical start on the piano, which led to conservatory studies, which in turn led him to give up the piano when it was insisted that he learn more technique before he could study composition. He moved to the sax because he saw so many players improvising on it, “and improvising was like instant composition.”

He wound up with a guitar because it enabled him to sing and to thus combine his interest in composition with his prose writing. “Also, I remember seeing the Rolling Stones on Ed Sullivan and thinking, ‘These guys are having so much fun.’ ”

He began playing around Wilmington with jazz-oriented drummer Billy Ficca, and his guitar work soon coalesced into the jarring, vibratoed style he would put to work in Television. He formed that band with Ficca, Richard Hell and Richard Lloyd in the early ‘70s, and by 1974 they were central figures in New York’s influential CBGB’s club scene, along with the Ramones, Patti Smith and Blondie.

Though there is a tendency among critics to describe Verlaine’s albums as works of art, he doesn’t necessarily subscribe to that label and doesn’t see a conflict in presenting his work through the highly commercialized music business.

“I don’t at all because what I’ve always wanted to do is write songs. I’m not into making soundscape pieces or Schoenberg or Stockhousen. I don’t think what I do is uncommercial. That I have interest from record labels shows there is a belief there of that, I think.”

Given Verlaine’s songs of uneasy sleep and all-too-rare tours, one could get the impression he’s a moody apartment recluse. But much of his conversation was punctuated with laughter, and he said very little of his time is spent brooding and slinking.

“Actually, I’d say since ’84 I’ve been out of New York more than I’ve been in it, whether it’s staying with friends in Europe or Nashville, just to be out of the city and in a different environment. I spent about two months of last year in Los Angeles, just for a change, and went out to Joshua Tree.”

He stays in touch with current music, with a recent affinity for Galaxie 500 and rappers Public Enemy, and also tours the art galleries monthly.

His main extra-musical pursuit is a fascination with the varieties of human thought. “I go through periods of investigating things. When I lived in Europe I spent five months reading various psychoanalytic theories. Or I hit moods where I want to learn about how somebody thought things that could be so foreign to me.

“It could be a poet, a theorist, a linguist or a composer that grabs you, and you try to find things that they wrote. I was reading some letters by Liszt, and this guy’s outlook is just so totally different from anything you would imagine for yourself, incredibly courteous, and at the same time very ferocious about what he wants, a very strong character.

“I don’t think these interests color what I write. But I think that it does keep your brain strong by studying outlooks that are so foreign to your own. I try to work out ‘How and why did this person ever develop this?’ ”

And if someone were to pore over Verlaine’s works with such an intent?

“I think they’d say, ‘Well, this guy’s method was chaos.’ ”

Tom Verlaine and Shawn Colvin perform at 8 tonight at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $15. Information: (714) 496-8930.