One mark of good artists is that the longer they practice their art, the closer it gets to the bone. So if the lyrics that Rick Berlin has written for the Shelley Winters Project’s new I Hate Everything But You (Windjam) seem candid, funny, conflicted, deep, worldly, and utterly human, and if the music embraces everything from theater to jazz to hokum to art rock and punk rock . . . well, so does Rick Berlin.

Those qualities even get some play when Berlin comes to terms with his own status as a bona fide artist as we talk over coffee in the laid-back Rhythm & Muse cafŽ/bookstore/record shop in Jamaica Plain. "I’ve always thought it was pretentious to say you’re an artist," he offers. "There are so many questions about what it is to be an artist. Is it an indulgence? Is it just that you don’t want to grow up? Why aren’t you out there protecting your future with a 401K?

"I think you’re very lucky if you get to sublimate your life experience in some microcosmic way. Art has moved me, changed my life, told me why something sucks, or gotten me through the day, whether it’s a film or a book or music. I never thought I was of that stature, but I keep putting shit out and putting shit out. After you’ve done it for a while, you start to think, well, maybe ‘artist’ is what I do. So I have learned to accept that’s what I do, and that it has an emotional impact and moves people."

Indeed, it’s hard to be unmoved in some way by the songs on I Hate Everything But You. Berlin’s portrait of innocence in "Only One of You," accented by the poignant, delay-laden notes of guitarist David Berndt; the acknowledgment of the masks we wear for others in "Xmas Face;" the punk-rock love in the title track; the sad interior conflicts of the suicides and depressives in "Hamlet" and "Breaking Down" — all hit their mark. Not only because Berlin has honed his lyric writing to precision over 30 years of musicmaking, but because, as he puts it, "my bandmates play this material to serve it, not themselves. That’s why I loved being in the studio with them, and it’s the first band I’ve had in years that I look forward to rehearsing with."

It helps, of course, that the other members of the Shelley Winters Project are excellent musicians. Berndt’s guitar dispenses everything from textural sonics to arena-rock heroics, and his horn arrangements ricochet from New Orleans dancehalls to Disneyland. Drummer Nigel Grover puts thrust into numbers like "Bad Day" (which weaves one of Berlin’s most dynamic vocal melodies into a lesson on how love eases our earthy burdens) and the title track, and he brings folky primitivism to "Tired" with his hand percussion. David Featherman has a deft touch on bass. Then there’s Meredith Cooper, who adds warm support with her gentle violin lines and breathy voice; she turns in a performance as a demented giant squirrel in a deliciously schizoid mid-disc "Intermission."

The driving force, however, is always Berlin. Not just for his plucked-from-life stories and his arrangements, which he brings to the band in detailed form, but for his tough piano playing. He approaches the instrument like a good punk-rock guitarist, driving the grooves in a spare forceful way, yet darting into angular blocks of sound and laying snatches of melody over his rhythm lines. Next to his voice — which rises and sinks like an emotional barometer of his lines, his homespun piano style is the band’s most distinctive instrument. "I don’t know the chords, I can’t do the up-and-down the keyboard thing, so I had to invent my own way of playing. I hit it really hard and break the piano all the time, but the piano parts do inform this band. There’s an architecture to how I do it."

Berlin began putting down his music’s building blocks in 1972, when he moved to Boston and formed Orchestra Luna, a colorful live band with a sonic mix that tapped many of the same veins that the Shelley Winters Project does: musical theater, jazz, rock. Presaging the like-minded Tubes by several years, the inventive ensemble became one of the area’s most popular outfits. Berlin, who at that time was appearing under his family name, Kinscherf, distinguished himself as a powerful, flamboyant frontman. In 1974 the group signed to Epic Records and released an album. But that LP, though quite good, didn’t fly. Over the next few years there were several more incarnations of the band, which eventually became simply Luna, and Kinscherf became Berlin.

Several record deals dissipated, and so did Luna. Berlin next formed Berlin Airlift, which received tremendous support from area radio and seemed ready to soar, but Handshake/CBS Records declared bankruptcy six weeks after the contract was signed. Rick Berlin — The Movie was next, and Berlin won a Boston Music Award for penning the group’s local hit "Rock ’n’ Roll Romance." But alas, no brass ring. After his next band, Rome Is Burning, turned to ash, Berlin began performing solo at Jacque’s, a drag bar in Boston’s Bay Village brimming with lowlife charm. It’s a gig he still holds down on Monday nights, often airing new songs on that glitter-dappled stage before bringing them to the Shelley Winters Project.

Seeing Berlin perform alone or with the band is a heartwarming experience because he holds nothing back. And because there’s something genuine and special in the chemistry of his voice, playing, and songs. As David Minehan, the producer of I Hate Everything But You, explains: "Rick has a sense of conviction that can turn lyrics into something that reaches into your heart and pulls the deepest string. He truly delivers his sense of emotions into his music. It’s a perfect balance of high art and base rock. And somehow, it’s all because of who Rick is. With his AIDS activism and political activism, his interest in great writers . . . he’s a bit of a Renaissance man."

The Shelley Winters Project actually grew out of an eclectic and sometimes daffy six-month modern-cabaret series that Berlin ran at the Lizard Lounge in 2000, when members of the house band — which included flexible guitarist Berndt — suggested they become a group. Their first trip to the studio with Minehan, who’s become a sort of adjunct member, yielded last year’s EP The Shelley Winters Project. Although that one was good, the new disc, which the band will celebrate with a CD-release gig at T.T. the Bear’s along with Bound 4 Venus and other guests this Saturday, April 20, is much more realized. It’s a fine representation of — as Berlin, who is fond of referring to the band as a single human being, might put it — Shelley the artist.

BIG IN JAPAN. Brian Charles’s debut CD, Sadderdaydreaming, has just been released in Japan, and the e-mails from fans and requests for interviews are already coming in. That’s not surprising, because Japanese rock fans are infatuated with the kind of classic-tinged pure pop that’s Charles’s specialty. It’s also not hard to draw a line from the Beatles to Charles’s songs and on to the likes of Radiohead and Catherine Wheel. Each tune is a sharp emotional essay framed by brawny guitars and hooks and Charles’s strong vocal melodies.

The Japanese deal with Air Mail Recordings is the third time the disc, which was first issued in 2000 by Boston’s Hearbox Records, has been licensed for release abroad. And several of its songs have aired on TV — most recently April 1 on the Fox Network series The American Embassy.

What’s ironic is that, at home in Boston, Charles is probably known better by musicians than by listeners. Sure, he’s a veteran of bands like Sidewalk Gallery (who once had a notorious punch-up with Oasis at the long-gone Allston club Bunratty’s) and the Next, and he’s turned up on stage playing guitar and piano with the Sheila Divine and Nina Gordon. In the summer of 2000 he even hosted a Wednesday-night series at T.T. the Bear’s that, at its peak, brought Gordon, members of Letters to Cleo, and the Figgs together on stage with him to perform George Michael’s "Freedom." But ever since he became a partner in Brookline’s Zippah recording studio, back in 1996, he’s spent less time on local stages and more producing and engineering music by the Sheila Divine, the Gigolo Aunts, the Figgs, Cherry 2000, Quick Fix, and many others. The Sheila Divine’s latest, Where Have All My Countrymen Gone (Co-Op Pop), is particularly masterful, with the kind of sculpted, wide-spectrum sound that usually comes from a fancy studio in Los Angeles or New York rather than from converted rooms in an old house.

Charles explains that the key to good production is having a process. "You start with a broom and finish with a toothpick. I used to oil-paint, and a teacher told me that. I had been trying to make everything perfect from the beginning, but first you need a basic overview of each song. I think of the parts of a song as blocks. Some might need to be moved, others reshaped, so the hooks and all the other crucial parts of the song are identified before you move on and begin to record."

Since Charles has his own studio, you might think that making the new album his label’s been asking him for would be easy, but during the past two years he’s gotten just four songs on tape. "You’d figure I could record any time I want. And I can, provided I don’t want to have the studio in a month. There’s a lot of overhead. And then it’s hard to muster up the energy to work on your own stuff after a 10-hour day recording another band, even if you can get on the studio’s schedule. Plus, when I’m not writing, I feel like I’m filling up. I fill up and spill over, and that’s when I’m writing songs."