The journey continues for musicians Joe Camerlengo and Branden Barnett

One doesn’t have to strain too hard to find the connective threads existent between musicians Joe Camerlengo and Branden Barnett, who will team with Joe Peppercorn and Josh Krajcik for the second go-round of the pair’s new songwriter showcase at Natalie’s Grandview tonight (Friday, Aug. 27).

Both Camerlengo and Barnett work in healthcare (Camerlengo as a nurse and Barnett as a mental health counselor), and both have deep musical catalogues dotted with vulnerable songs in which they have occasionally unpacked aspects of their own mental health journeys. Beyond that, the two have evolved and adapted their approaches to making music, as well as their aims for these creative pursuits, accounting for the myriad life changes that have accompanied growing older.

“And it’s not that we’re slowing down. We’re just finding different ways to channel this energy and different ways that it can serve us,” said Camerlengo, who joined Barnett for a late August interview. “It’s not like that 20s and 30s life where it’s like, ‘I’ve got 16 shows this week,’ and I’m bugging the fuck out of everybody. … [Back then], we needed to be famous as soon as we could, and if you stopped to breathe, that wasn’t possible.”

Barnett, meanwhile, said he now has “zero desire” to have a career in the music industry, having gotten a taste of it in his 20s when his band, Ghost Shirt, received enough buzz that it played a label showcase at the late, loved CBGBs in New York. “And you’re getting your hopes up, and not having a nice apartment, and sleeping in a van, and never seeing your family and friends. And I realized very quickly, this was not my goal,” Barnett said. “And I think what I figured out was that this thing I’d wanted my whole life was actually a really crappy job. But I love songwriting, and even if I don’t release anything, I’ll always write songs. … It’s a thing my brain can hang onto to help me process my emotions better.”

Songwriting has served a similar role throughout Camerlengo’s varied career, which has seen him write and release music in a variety of guises, including This Is My Suitcase, Van Dale, Blanket Boys, and most recently under his own name. And yet, Camerlengo said he often wasn’t aware in the moment that this deeper processing was taking place. As one example, he pointed to the first Van Dale record, where he wrote the songs by opening to random pages of a book written entirely in German – a language he doesn’t read or speak – and basing his lyrics on what he thought the text said. 

“So, I thought it was totally stream-of-conscious nonsense,” Camerlengo said, and laughed. “But as you get further away [from the songs], you realize they’re all about you. There’s one song about my grandpa dying. And then ‘Bed of Bricks,’ it’s about seeing your friends manifest their artistic dreams and being like, ‘Now what about me?’ … And I can see all of that in the lyrics now.”

For the set at Natalie’s, Camerlengo said he selected a handful of songs that center his mental health journey, in part because he wanted to have something interesting to talk about with each selection rather than being onstage saying, “I wrote this, and I wrote this, and I wrote this.”

“But my vibe [for the show] isn’t, oh, please pity me and my struggle,” he said. “It’s more that each song was chosen because it’s tied up in where my head was at or how I was feeling then.”

The song choices are also reflective of a decision Camerlengo recently made to more openly discuss his mental health. “It was like, maybe if I start saying this out loud, other people will be like, ‘Hey, it’s not a big deal,’” said Camerlengo, who began by making a post on social media. “And I swear I wasn’t fishing, like, oh, tell me I’m beautiful. But people responded and said: ‘I’ve been there’; ‘I’m going through that’; ‘This is great to read.’ And when that happened, it was like, okay, there was a nice purpose to sharing. And it’s nice to feel like … a lot of people are in the same boat.”

In stepping back from pursuing music as a career, both Camerlengo and Barnett said they had allowed more space into the writing process, sometimes drafting a song and letting it breathe for weeks or even months before returning to it – an idea that would have been inconceivable in those earlier days. “I used to torture myself, where if I didn’t write for a week, it was like, ‘You’re fucked. You’re done. You’re no one.’ Because my sense of identity was so tied to my creative output,” Barnett said. “And I think life experience and getting older and tragedy have sort of pulled that apart for me, where … I just want to catch the good ones now instead of trying to prove to myself I’m special all the time, because that’s what it was – a treadmill of specialness where if I stop writing, I’m just some asshole.”

Within this shift, Barnett said he has gained a better awareness of the moment he is attempting to grasp in picking up a pen, his favorite songs often centering around a single line where some deeper truth is able to cut through the murk. “My brain, I’m not very good at thinking or putting ideas together, and I’m pretty cloudy a lot of the time,” Barnett said. “And somehow with the songwriting, the subconscious can metabolize all of these experiences into this little crystal.”

On the Ghost Shirt record Crayon Dragon, for instance, there’s a song called “Orphans,” which centers on the line “nobody talks about how bored you get on the other side of a granted wish.” Barnett said the line struck him like a flash one day when he was driving, reducing him to tears. “And as soon as that came, I was like, ‘There’s the heart. There’s the vulnerability,’” he said. “And now everything else in the song can support that. And instead of just being a narrative or a story, everything points back to that feeling or helps people feel that feeling.”

While the two will likely discuss heavy subjects onstage at Natalie’s, both view the performance not as some grand statement of purpose but more as more of a creative check-in landing amid an ongoing adventure. “The point isn’t, oh, my art comes from mental pain. The point is more like, wow, what a journey it’s been, and I’m still on it,” Camerlengo said. “I’ve been singing songs about it to you for 25 years, and here’s a little snapshot. And I’m hoping … if I present these songs one at a time, and then talk about the creative process with each, maybe by the end people will be like, ‘Oh, I guess the journey never stops.’”