When singer/songwriter Marcelo Guimaraes is working his way through a coffeehouse gig, he'll frequently notice some of the caffeinated kids slowly turning their heads sideways with that puzzled look dogs get when trying to understand something. You see, Guimaraes plays a right-handed guitar left handed; upside down, if you will.

It's what's natural to him.

"Growing up in the '80s in Brazil, to buy a left-handed guitar was expensive," Guimaraes says. "Plus I wanted to be able to go to a party and pick up any guitar and play."

Born in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, Guimaraes came to the States when he was 20 on an electronic engineering scholarship from Kansas University in Lawrence, Kansas. After graduation, a job offer from Kodak pulled him and his backwards guitar to Rochester in 1997.

An accomplished musician for nearly all his life, Guimaraes has finally released his first album, Mind The Music.

It finally felt natural.

"It happened now because only now I felt ready," he says. "Only now everything fell into place and I was able to find my way through my own maze of doubts and complications."

Well worth the wait, Mind The Music is a gentle acoustically centered 11-song odyssey. And though he'll augment live gigs with assorted covers and Brazilian standards, it's all Guimaraes on this platter.

"When I started learning," he says. "I found it easier to write songs than to learn someone else's songs." And as his fan base grows he'll be able to weed out the cover tunes in lieu of his own material.

But Guimaraes isn't sure that fan base is ready for songs in Portuguese just yet. However, the tune "Algo Bem Natural" is easily the prettiest cut on the album. That's not to take away from the lyrical insight or the slick instrumentation by his carefully hand-picked band, but --- for non-Portuguese speaking folks, anyway --- when the language barrier clouds the story, the voice is reduced, or elevated rather, to that of a naturally beautiful instrument.

In fact, that was the whole idea behind "Algo Bem Natural" to begin with when Guimaraes set out to write it when he was 14.

"It means ‘something very natural,'" Guimaraes explains. "I had these chords in my mind and I wanted to write a song and I was struggling 'cause I couldn't find something. So I thought, Instead of thinking so much, I'm just gonna play these chords in some order and throw some melody on top of it. It took me 20 minutes to get the chord progression once I stopped fighting and accepted it."

For now Guimaraes plays solo with his eyes on eventually getting the whole studio line-up on stage.

"That would be really cool to reproduce some of the stuff we did on the CD," he says. "I'm just dreading facing the nightmare of coordinating everybody's schedules."

He's also hoping to rally the troops into the studio later this year for album numero dos.

"I have 50 songs ready to go," he says. "But it's very time consuming --- and marriage consuming. And I'm trying to enjoy this moment."

Hell, that's only natural.

Marcelo Guimaraes plays Saturday, March 24, at Starry Nites Coffee, 696 University Avenue, 271-2630, at 8 p.m., free. www.marcelomusica.com