Josh Berwanger battles demons on his latest EP

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%

Shooting music videos is meticulous work, not without some drudgery. I see the exasperation on Josh Berwanger’s face before he starts another take inside the Lawrence Arts Center. The shot calls for him to float on a hoverboard down a dark industrial hallway.

Director Jordan Marable is yet not satisfied. He needs more smoke.

“Natalie,” he calls to me, “you want to work a fog machine?” This is for art. I say yes. I say yes even before Berwanger promises me a producer’s credit. Marable’s assistant provides careful instructions: “Press this red button when he says, ‘Action.'”

Marable directs his star: “Look around like you’re in a dream and you don’t know where you’re going. Action!”

The fog machine’s discharge smells like an especially cloying air freshener cut with strong chemicals — the perfume of art. Berwanger hovers down the hallway. Marable walks backward in front of him, his camera fixed on the singer’s in-character bewilderment. When the director calls cut to check the playback, Berwanger steps off the board and begins to explain the video for a song called “Demonios” that’s part of his self-titled EP.

“It’s kind of like a dream sequence,” he says. “The song just kind of deals with being on tour and facing all these different obstacles and being older and trying to really stick it out in music. I feel like I sacrifice so much. I love this more than anything, but what exactly am I accomplishing?”

Berwanger pauses to greet a friend, a Lawrence Arts Center employee who has accidentally interrupted the shoot on her way through the hall. Their brief interaction is cheerful, but when Berwanger turns back to me, he isn’t smiling.

“That’s not exactly what the video’s about,” he continues. “It’s more what the song is about. Having all these feelings of ‘Why am I still doing this? It’s so hard,’ and then, at the same time, being like, ‘Oh, I love it. That’s why.'”

Later, over drinks, Berwanger lays out the details of his recent struggle with music, which isn’t on the creative end — he’s writing new songs constantly, he says. Rather, he references his stellar 2013 full-length, Strange Stains, his debut with the four-piece Josh Berwanger Band (known simply as Berwanger now) that concluded his six-year hiatus from music. (Before that, he was the lead singer in the Only Children and in the Anniversary.) Since Strange Stains came out, Berwanger, 37, has felt the harsh limitations of the industry.

“We’ve been touring for two years now on that last record, playing a lot,” he says. “We have to play Chicago eight times just to get a crowd of 60 to 80 people. We’ve done some great things — we’re going into our fourth pressing of Strange Stains, which, with a label with no distribution, is huge. But I can’t fund this band by myself forever.”

Berwanger speaks solemnly and quietly, hunching his shoulders and leaning into our conversation. He goes on: “It’s not like I’ll play a couple shows on the weekend and that’s it. That’s not good enough for me. When I do something, it’s, like, 100 percent. If I’m going to do it, I want to go all the way. So to continually find yourself in the same spot as you were when you started, it’s just a constant battle.”

It’s a battle that has left Berwanger with some cracked armor. You can hear the damage in these new songs.

“Demonios” sounds cheerful, a surfy tune with an addictive hook, malt-shop ooh-ooh-ahs and squealing guitar riffs. But Berwanger’s lyrics tell a different story. Please let these demons go away, he chirps in his light tenor. Ever since I was a child, they just sat around and smiled. In the final verse, Berwanger begs for relief.

Elsewhere on the EP, Berwanger laments the “young and lonely” death of Susie on the yet buoyant “Why Are You So Strange.” A danceable slide guitar highlights “Blackheart of Life” as Berwanger ruminates over the destructive power of depression. “Her Crystal Room” is as close as he gets to a ballad, a shimmering sliver of hope about love newly found. But Berwanger does not allow himself a happy ending even there.

“I’ve been really depressed lately, which is really weird — it’s been a weird thing to experience,” he admits, his eyes on the glass of whiskey in front of him. He’s still wearing his outfit from the shoot — a striped silk shirt (a thrift-store women’s pajama top, he tells me), a newsboy cap and faded eyeliner. At the moment, he looks more like a jilted character in a gloomy film noir than he does the leader of a rock band.

“This sounds dumb, probably, because I know that most people would say this, but music is the only thing that I’ve been able to make sense of doing,” he says. “I feel like it’s the only thing that I’m great at, or at least good at. I ruin everything else, like relationships. Not that I try to. I’ve just always put music ahead of — except for my son — everything else. And maybe I regret doing that to a certain extent, at this point in my life.

“I feel like the only way I can get through sometimes is in writing a song,” he continues. “And doing that, that makes me happy. But it’s not there for you after it’s done, you know? And that’s the difference really. A person is there for you after the song is done. But I can’t go back and be like, ‘Comfort me, song,’ because it’s not going to. It’s just something I got out. It was a feeling.”

He pauses. “Did I go off? Should I not have said some of those things?” He gives a wry smile.

This is Berwanger’s thing: a share-it-all willingness to cram a little bit of ugliness into a hook-heavy pop song. By the end of the EP, with the sun setting on the battlefield where he has met his demons, there’s a hint that he just might win. You gotta believe you’re not falling, you gotta keep both shoes on the ground, Berwanger repeats on the acoustic closing track, “Lost and Founds.” It’s a mantra, one that comes to mind as we leave the bar. I watch him place one foot in front of the other, hands shoved in his pockets, while we walk to our cars in the cold.

“That might have been the darkest interview ever,” he tells me, back outside the Lawrence Arts Center, and his voice sounds both amused and contrite. “Please,” he says after offering a one-armed embrace, “don’t make me sound too cynical.”