The music is what brought Garrison Keillor from the prairie back to the beach. "To do a New Year’s Eve show from Hawaii, I think, is to give people a very different sound," said the humorist, writer and host of "A Prairie Home Companion," the public radio variety show he is bringing back to Honolulu for two live broadcasts Saturday at Blaisdell Concert Hall.

"For a night when people are in a festive but contemplative mood … I just imagine it being a great pleasure for people on the mainland, especially in the north, of course, (to hear) Hawaiian slack-key guitar music and Hawaiian singing."

Being A great and prolific storyteller, there’s a story behind this:

"I remember having to go out early to start my car at 4 a.m. in January or March to do an early morning show," he said last week in a phone call from Minnesota, where he and his colleagues were making final preparations to travel here.

"The music of Gabby Pahinui meant a lot to me. I had a cassette tape of his that I used to play always on cold winter mornings, the windshield frosted over. The car does start, but the heater is sort of moaning as it tries to turn, and you make your way out of the parking space, the snow plowed up around you. … For me the music just had a spiritual quality. It did not make me want to move to Hawaii, I did not want to do that, but the music itself really spoke to me. There was a gentleness about it, and it had a passion about it."

Keillor remembers the show’s first trip here in 1985 when the Kahelelani Serenaders "played music that just melted your heart." So it’s not surprising that local musicians will be one of the highlights of the Hawaii broadcasts, and it will be a stellar lineup. Slack-key stars Ledward Kaapana, Danny Carvalho and Jeff Peterson will appear along with ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro.

Kaapana has performed in previous "Prairie Home Companion" broadcasts, even traveling to Minnesota to do one at the show’s home base, and it was Keillor’s interaction with the great guitarist that helped him identify commonalities between the cultures of the Midwestern prairie and the Pacific islands.

"The Hawaiian musicians I’ve met, Carlos Andrade and Led, seem very loyal to a particular part of the islands that they come from. They have a sense that they are carrying something on that’s entrusted to them," he said. "In Hawaii you come across people who are loyal to a small place, a village or part of an island, and that is the basis of storytelling, it seems to me. If we are going to tell stories about our people, our culture, our language, our place, we’re going to be talking about a village or town."

"It’s the loyalty to a small place that takes us out of ourselves and makes us part of something larger."

Like many great storytellers, Keillor grew up listening to kin relate the family history. His father, a postal worker in the then-rural town of Anoka, Minn., claimed to have forgotten it, but his aunts and uncles filled in the gaps in "astonishing detail."

"You just lay there in the living room hiding, hoping your mother wouldn’t send you to bed," he said, recalling stories of his ancestors emigrating from Scotland to Canada, then to America, leaving behind tragic tales of "homes that burned down," vignettes about "people who were odd, living as hermits in the forest," and the epic romance of his grandfather, who "carried my grandmother up the stairs to bed every night until he became too old and decrepit to do that."

His famous tales from Lake Wobegon — a ficticious Midwestern town "where the women are strong, the men are all good-looking and the children are all above average" — stem from his experience in other small Midwestern towns, including a stint he spent in Freeport, Minn., populated mostly by German Catholics and Norwegian Lutherans.

Lutherans figure prominently in his tales, not because he finds them funnier than Catholics, but because they are "quite comfortable with being made fun of. Catholics are not. That’s been my experience, as an outsider," said Keillor, who grew up Protestant.

Keillor will write two separate programs for the Honolulu shows, a feat that is not particularly challenging for someone who "loves to work on eight or 10 projects at a time."

"You just jump from one to another, and each one distracts you from the other, and distraction is always good for a writer," he said. "Sitting and focusing hard is just not the preferred method, in my experience. You want to surprise yourself, come quickly around a corner and suddenly things become clear that wouldn’t have if you had sat staring at your paragraphs."

Since he loves his work so much, he has decided against retiring, as he hinted in a recent interview.

Saturday’s shows at the Blaisdell will include a midday program that will air locally at its regular 6 p.m. broadcast time and an afternoon show that will be timed to coordinate with New Year’s Eve celebrations on the East Coast. The audience at the second show will get to participate in a New Year’s Eve countdown at 7 p.m.

Aside from the local musicians, the shows will include chapters of the familiar "Lives of the Cowboys" and Guy Noir detective series, as well as music from the All-Star Shoe Band.

Longtime cast member Tim Russell is eager to come to Hawaii. Although it has been a surprisingly mild winter in Minnesota, "we’re all desperately afraid that the other shoe will drop at any moment," he said.

Russell has been with "Prairie Home" since 1994 and specializes in character voices, dropping into a dead-on Julia Child or Bill Clinton in an instant.

"Our skill, I think, is with very little rehearsal and on short order, we kind of fill in the blanks," he said. "It’s a shorthand, almost. Garrison certainly leads the way with his scripts, and then we pick a voice."

"Prairie Home Companion" is, of course, a radio show, but visually it has entertainment value as well. Sound-effects specialist Fred Newman will be seen wearing shoes around his neck, ready to make the sound of footsteps, or coconut shells to create hoofbeats, throwing in a convincing whinny or "moo" for added effect. He eschews computer-generated effects, since they lack improvisation.

"The show never suffers from over-rehearsal," Newman said, comparing it to a "live piece of jazz."

Keillor will often throw in random, unscripted references that call for a specific sound, such as a giraffe or "a helicopter descending into a giant vat of jello," which Newman has to make up on the spot.

"I’m not a really a radio sound-effects guy, I just play one on the radio," he said.