On the same day that the Straight catches up with JMSN via telephone, the singer—known to his friends and family as Christian Berishaj—has also just released a video for the song “Foolin’ ”. The song is a classic slow jam, all glistening strings and midnight-lovin’ Fender Rhodes, topped by JMSN’s intimate crooning of set-on-seduction lines such as “You know you turn me on/It’s a feeling I can’t hide.” The video, however, looks like it was uploaded straight from a VHS dub of a public-access-cable talk show from 30 years ago.

Reached after a sound check at Apt. 200 in Montreal, Berishaj says that he’ll be putting out a video for each of the tracks on the second JMSN LP, The Blue Album, and they all share a similar look. That aesthetic is markedly different from that of his last batch of videos, a set of slick and cinematic clips that accompanied his previous record, 2012’s Priscilla. Those were shot with a RED Epic, the type of high-end digital video camera employed by the makers of big-budget films like Transformers: Age of Extinction and Jurassic World.

“There are definitely several reasons why I did it,” Berishaj notes of the marked change of style, “but the one that kind of sticks out to me is the contrast of the music versus the video. I feel like it was such a good contrast to have lo-fi videos with what I considered a hi-fi album, with good mixing.…I mean, I hope it’s good mixing. I did it, I don’t want to say it’s good. You know, I’m biased.

“I just loved that contrast,” the singer, songwriter, and producer continues. “And also, when we first shot ‘Street Sweeper’, which was the first video that came out, we tried to shoot it with the RED, and it just felt wrong. It sucks to waste all that money to figure out that you need to do something else, but it was all for the better, in the bigger picture. It didn’t feel right when it was all clean and the music was super-clean. It was like, ‘This is not really doing anything for me.’ For me, it had to be something that made me feel something.”

Berishaj has never been afraid to switch things up, and his decade-long career has seen him evolve from the teenage frontman of the snotty indie-rock band Love Arcade into a Jesus-bearded soul man whose music wouldn’t be out of place on your PBR&B playlist alongside tracks by How to Dress Well, the Weeknd, and Autre Ne Veut. In between, Berishaj even had a stint as a major-label act. Signed to Universal Motown under the name Christian TV, Berishaj released a string of on-the-nose dance-pop singles with titles like “When She Turns 18” and “Let’s Just Fuck” and appropriately skeevy videos.

“I feel like, as a person at that time, I didn’t have a lot of depth,” he admits. “I was young and thought I had it all figured out. Right now, in my mind, so many different things matter than mattered to the Christian that was 22 or 23, or even 25, for that matter.”

As Christian TV, Berishaj says, he was under the influence of people whose opinions he thought were important. These days, he puts JMSN’s music out on his own White Room Records. He stops short of dismissing the notion that he’d ever sign another major-label deal, but he makes it clear that he will never allow outside forces to shape who he is as an artist.

“If somebody comes along with a genuine understanding of what JMSN is and a genuine plan of how they can add something to what we’re doing, then we can talk,” he says. “But if you’re just like, ‘Yeah, we can go to radio…’ No. If that’s all you’re gonna bring, no. That’s not what this is. You don’t get it if you’re trying to just put this on the radio and see if it sticks to the wall. We’re building a foundation and something real.”

In any case, it’s hard to imagine what a major-label A&R person would make of a music video that looks as if it was shot with a 1985 Sony Handycam.

JMSN plays Electric Owl on Friday (February 27).