The reunited Anniversary heads back to the Bottleneck

Josh Berwanger is hanging out in my living room, drinking an iced coffee, expressing admiration for three of the four cats roaming the house. Ostensibly, we’re discussing the reunion of his former band the Anniversary, for which he plays guitar and sings. But we keep getting sidetracked talking about horror movies.

“I just found out we’re playing after Gwar at Riot Fest,” Berwanger says. “How do you follow that? We might have to sacrifice something.”

A little background: the Lawrence-based indie act released two well-received albums — Designing a Nervous Breakdown and Your Majesty — in the early 2000s, then broke up midtour in San Antonio, Texas, in late November 2003. This past July, though, the group reunited for its first show in nearly 14 years.

So the Lawrence show at the Bottleneck promises to be something of a to-do, a hometown show ending a string of dates — Seattle, Las Vegas, San Diego. Buffalo, New York, along with stops in Texas and Florida — but Berwanger is realistic.

“I’m not thinking of it so much as a to-do as a to-don’t,” he says with a grin. “The to-don’t is to not drink too much before we play, because that is going to be so much family, so many old friends from when we used to play the Replay and Taproom, and just so many people coming from out of town for that show.”

Keyboardist and singer Adrianne deLanda  — formerly Verhoeven — agrees.

“It’s going to be a wonderful and special way to wrap up the trip, and we are really looking forward to it,” she writes in an e-mail. “We played our first real show at the Bottleneck in 1996: an open mic night that Jacki Becker helped us line up. Jacki was extremely supportive of us from the very beginning and throughout our tenure as a band before we parted ways. We are very grateful for that — and she is promoting this show, which seems perfect.”
The Anniversary never did knock-out business, nor did it enjoy quite the reach of its label peer the Get Up Kids. But the band’s music has continued to spread over the past 15 years, thanks to the Internet and its constant thirst for lists; see Stereogum’s “30 Essential Songs From the Golden Era of Emo,” which named-checked three songs from the Anniversary’s debut.

“I never thought that this would happen,” Berwanger says. “You just keep moving. You never look back — I mean, every so often, there’d be the top-20 emo songs, and someone would tag me and I’d be like, ‘Cool.’ It’s just really cool.”

Berwanger has never really stopped moving. His first band after the split, the Only Children, was around longer than the Anniversary was, and he has worked steadily by himself and with other musicians. (His own next album is due this fall.) He still plays Anniversary songs, though, and DeLanda cites Berwanger and his band’s performances of the Your Majesty cut “The Siren Sings,” when they came through San Francisco, as igniting the reunion. “It started the fire burning and gave us the opportunity to really get a conversation going with everyone about playing again,” she says in her e-mail.

The Anniversary’s first show back was in front of nearly 14,000 people, as part of the Taste of Chaos Festival in California. Earlier interviews with the band indicated that it didn’t quite go as planned — Berwanger described it to me as a “cluster,” dogged by a certain rustiness. The band soon shook off the dust and started playing clubs and feeling good about the results. “It was fun. We played good. The crowd was great,” Berwanger says.

Given that every member of the Anniversary is a parent now, the reunion’s logistics weren’t simple.

“Doing 10 shows was very hard, with everyone’s jobs and kids,” Berwanger says. “Every time somebody posts, ‘Come play here!’ — trust us, we want to go to those places, but ultimately, this was what we could do. We weren’t, like, an At the Drive-In band. It’s an amazing thing, and a positive thing. If someone wants to say it’s a money grab, or that we’re doing this for the wrong reasons, we don’t fucking care. We know why we’re doing it. We have the fire to play these songs, and the rehearsals have been great, so let’s enjoy it and not worry about planning anything out.”

(There is at least a plan for vintage Anniversary music: vinyl repressings on Vagrant Records. Your Majesty will get a run of 500 copies, and Designing a Nervous Breakdown 1,000.)

To the inevitable question of whether there might be more Anniversary, Berwanger’s answer at least sounds positive.

“Who knows what these shows could lead to? This could be it, or there could be more,” he says. “To me, it’s the approach of, ‘Let’s have fun. Let’s take it in.’ Being in that moment: It’s just so rare. Sometimes, even playing the show, when you only have 30 or 40 minutes, it’s like, ‘fuck.’ It’s hard to be in the moment when you’re constantly moving all day, figuring shit out and planning. For me, it’s just important to be in the moment of the music, and the friends and the fans. For us to do this — to go out and be excited — it’s a good feeling.”

The Anniversary
with Heidi Lynn Gluck, Psychic Heat and Lily Pryor
Saturday, September 17, at the Bottleneck