Three years ago, Adam Blessing was toiling away in a restaurant when suddenly, somewhere between refilling someone’s Diet Coke and sprinkling a customer’s salad with ground pepper, he had an epiphany.

On a stage in the restaurant was a cluster of college kids playing music, sharing some laughs and, as it turns out, making lots of money in the process.

“They would make in three hours what I would make in an entire evening of pushing tables. I thought, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’” Blessing recalls.

“If I just learn how to sing and write some songs,” he thought, “I could do this instead of waiting tables for extra money – and I’d enjoy it a whole lot more.”

Fast forward to 2008, and Blessing, now 26, is a fixture in Central PA’s acoustic scene, peddling lilting, almost jazzy folk songs with Jack Johnson’s beach-bum mellowness and Ben Harper’s working-man’s soul in any and every venue that’ll have him. Inspired by everyone from Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles to Paul Simon and Sting, Blessing has learned how to infuse his songs with a swing and shuffle, but in a way that won’t cause too many ripples in the pool. Easy-breezy is the name of the game.

While Blessing’s been playing the guitar for 19 years now, this is his first foray into the world of solo performance. So far, he says, so good.

“I mean, no one has thrown anything yet,” he quips. “I love it. It is especially fun … when you write a song that people are moved by. I really enjoy when I can tell that I have an emotional connection with the audience.”

While the impetus for writing songs came about while Blessing was waiting tables, the melodic and lyrical ideas for many of his songs developed while he was slogging it out scrubbing toilets as a nighttime janitor.

“To help pass the time, I would write songs. I would be singing and vacuuming. Plus, the acoustics are great in most bathrooms,” he says. “Usually, I was assigned to clean in office buildings, places with lots of cubicles and Post-it Notes. So when I would get an idea or a melody in my head, I would grab a Post-it Note and write it down. Then when I would get home I would empty my pockets and line up the notes and build a song out of them.”

All of those little yellow squares resulted in Blessing’s debut album, Out of the Box, released last spring. And apparently, he had a few notes left over – despite juggling his job, steady gigs, volunteer ministry work and a young family, Blessing’s already got another EP in the works that could be out as early as this fall. That, however, might be the peak of his ambition.