Many Brandeis students know Dan Levine as the guy who tables in the Usdan Student Center for a free trip to Israel. Others know him as a musician who occasionally performs at Cholmondeley's. Now 25, Levine has been recording music since high school. His solo project under the name Daniel Harris began two years ago when he started working for Hillel at Brandeis. Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Levine-a self-described "verbose creature"-for a lengthy interview in his office on campus. What follows are excerpts in which he discusses his career, his influences and his guiding musical principles.JustArts: How long have you been gigging and recording music?

Dan Levine: I started playing open mic in high school [in Monroe, N.Y.] with my best friend, Matt. We were always writing, but we also did a lot of covers, and we'd book gigs at local coffee shops, birthday parties, that kind of stuff. Funny enough, our first band was Hillel, because we were obsessed with the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers, and their original guitarist was named Hillel Slovak. Later on we threw in a drummer, and then our friend Ryan joined us, and we changed the name to Ethan's House of Pancakes. Then by the end of senior year of high school, my friend called us up asking to start a band. I was like, "Sure, I'm always ready to start a band." He's like, "Alright, we have a gig in two weeks, at the House of Blues in Cambridge!"

JA: That was your first gig?

DL: Our first gig as a band, yeah. We ended up playing as Family Junction. Our first two gigs were at the original House of Blues in Harvard Square. We started off as an acoustic trio. We got up there and did a six-minute version of the humpty dance and a weird vocal jam based on the word "iocane." We were into very weird stuff. Family Junction then progressed and started taking cues from Frank Zappa, and then Phish, then Radiohead and Salt-n-Pepa.

JA: What inspired your 2007 album, This is so much better than Elton John?

DL: This is where my solo career really started to gain more full-length momentum, and there was a lot more time put into it. There's a magazine up in Portsmouth, N.H. called The Wire, and in the winter of '06 they... were challenging everybody, in the month of February, to write and record an album. I helped a friend of mine do it that year, and it was a lot of fun. I decided to do it over my entire February break in '07, just before I started this job. ... I did everything on a Tascam four-track cassette recorder and plugged all of my pedals in. Everything that you hear on that album was done 100-percent live, in one shot with no overdubs.

JA: Your EP Faarminals, Aarminals, and Nick Nolte is less straightforward than either Elton John or your more recent album, Thirty-Two Bit Isn't Really Eight Bits Better.

DL: Those tracks came from loops that I created. I've been really into that kind of ambient sound ever since the fall of '04 when I got my first loop station. That summer I learned that it's not just about chord progressions; it's not just about having an A section, then a B section, return to the A section. That's when I really started to paint with sound. To me, that EP is a painting.

JA: Given that characterization, it would seem that your albums are thematic.

DL: Thelonious Monk's theory on recording an album was that you should be able to do it in one or two takes, completely live, because you are really able to capture a personal zeitgeist. That's the way I create my albums: They are very specific to where I was at the time. What's different about Thirty-Two Bit is that it was recorded over an 18-month period, unlike my other stuff.

JA: It seems like that album is also a lot more polished. "San Jose," for instance, is pretty complex.

DL: That song began with a poem that my girlfriend wrote at the time. Everything just came out. I didn't have to think about anything-it was very visceral and very heartfelt. When I finished that I was very proud. I really felt like all of my musical education from the time that my dad showed me how to use a turntable as a kid to the moment that I recorded it came out in that song.

JA: Sometimes when I listen to your music, I find myself laughing. Is there an element of comedy that goes into the writing of your songs?

DL: [Laughter] Absolutely. My whole life I've been a big fan of satire. My uncle is a political cartoonist who is incredibly cynical and dark, and the musicians I've tended to gravitate towards tend to have a misanthropic element to them. Satire isn't always meant to be funny; it should also point out the vice and folly of society-but satire can be brutally hilarious sometimes.

JA: Who do you see as your biggest influences?

DL: Frank Zappa is a huge influence on me, specifically the album Weasels Rip My Flesh. The way he goes from intense tribal beats to performance art to a highly composed orchestral piece, genre-hopping left and right, all the while very much in touch with his environment, is very inspiring to me. . Recently, though, I've been listening a lot to Charles Manson Sings.

JA: Wait, you mean the murderer Charles Manson?

DL: [Laughter] Yeah, it's really good!

JA: You say that you managed to play your way out of a potential arrest for "protesting" in Washington, D.C. What happened?

DL: Well, I was playing my song, ... and a police officer came over to me and told me that I had to stop, because I was protesting. I begged her to let me sing one more song, a love song. I told her: "I don't want to protest, I just want to profess my love for you." She kind of looked at me funny, and said, "All right." So I sang "A Song For You" from Thirty-Two Bit. Then I put my guitar away, packed up my stuff, whipped out a kazoo and hummed my way back down the steps.

Daniel Harris will perform this Saturday at 7 p.m. at Church of Boston ($10). Visit his Web site at http://www.myspace.com/danielhmusic.