The next great American songwriter-poet fully arrives with his new album, The Great Despiser
Four years ago, a 23-year-old carpenter from Chicago snuck into a recording studio where his buddy worked. On nights when musicians had cancelled their slots, Joe Pug sang his first songs, and recorded them, for free.
The very first song on what would become Pug’s EP Nation of Heat was a startling announcement of arrival, a tobacco-stained Old Testament voice emerging from a young man defiantly yet somehow tenderly telling us just exactly what he was about to do. Pug was like Homer stating his intentions at the beginning of the Odyssey:
“….I’ve come to roam the forest past the village
With a dozen lazy horses in my cart
I’ve come here to get high,
To do more than just get by.
I’ve come to test the timbre of my heart
Oh, I’ve come to test the timbre of my heart
And I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to see that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind
To reach forward and behind
For the more I seek the more I’m sought
Yes, the more I seek the more I’m sought.”
Pug has been seeking ever since and he is surely ever more greatly sought. The songs from those first recording sessions resulted in a pair of EPs, and Pug from the outset cut a different path, one decidedly apart from the conventions of the music industry. He gave his music away – anyone who would write him had only to ask how many copies they wanted and he’d send it out, even covering the postage. Later, he offered (and still does) a free download of the EP on his website.
It worked. Word of Pug travelled wildly and widely. More than 30,000 people downloaded music from his website and the road beckoned. He quit his day job and began touring the nation. He was shocked to arrive in towns to find crowds at his gigs who already knew all his songs. There was some quality in his music that inspired not only passionate fans, but fans who recruited – or literally forced – others to listen to his music. His fervency as a singer was matched by the fervency of those who listened.
“Our fans essentially became like a radio station for us, and they still are,” Pug said recently, in the press release announcing this week’s release of his new full-length album, The Great Despiser.
Pug’s journey into song actually began when he dropped out of the University of North Carolina– where he was studying to be a playwright – just before his senior year.
“Yeah, I was slated for another year at Chapel Hill and I just, literally the night before classes were supposed to start, said, ‘Oh man, I can’t fucking do this any more,’” he said in an interview this week. “I just packed and moved and was in Chicago two days later.”
He’d written a play called “Austin Fish” but it never felt right. After arriving in Chicago, he picked up a guitar for the first time since his teenage years – his father, a musician who’d quit when Pug was born, had taught him to play – and discovered he could address the same themes he’d hoped to convey as a playwright within the form of a song.
“It was a play I tried to write many times, and as a writer you know – or should know – when something is not working,” Pug recalled. “You go back and read it and say, ‘Well, I can’t say there’s anything specifically wrong with it, but it’s just not working…’ Then there was something happening with the songs, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what this is, either, but for me, on an aesthetic level, this is working. So let’s go with this.’”
Pug has been very frequently compared with Bob Dylan, and for very good reason – there is a certain Dylan-esque rasp in his delivery, and the truth is there are few other antecedents in the history of American music in which such an astonishing outpouring of fully formed songs emerged from such a young, deeply lyrical and strangely worldly-wise songwriter.
But what sets Pug apart isn’t his lineage from Dylan (who he noted “invented this job”) but the fact that his work seems to emerge just as much from American literature. He cites influences such as Walt Whitman (Pug says his first songs were “the palest imitation of Leaves of Grass ever recorded…”), Jack Kerouac, Raymond Carver, and Cormac McCarthy. Pug is also a great craftsman; there is nothing haphazard in his approach – he’s a carpenter who writes sturdy songs built to last.
Pug said that his time as a carpenter still influences his songwriting.
“When I started with carpentry, I was just a carpenter’s helper,” Pug said. “And we got in there to do a remodel thing and the guy I was working for looked around and said, ‘Okay, well, how are we going to do this?’ I looked at him. ‘What do you mean, how are we going to do this? There is a way you do these things, right?’ But I came to learn if you are working with a really good carpenter, they figure it out as the job dictates, and every job is different. You never figure out how to build houses; you figure out how to build a house. And it’s the same thing with songwriting. You never figure out how to write songs; you have to figure out how to write the particular song that is in front of you. And what you learn from that song doesn’t necessarily help you with other songs.”
He is also workmanlike in that he pays close attention to the masters of his craft, both as a writer and a performer. He toured as an opening act with Steve Earle two years ago, and observed closely, later noting that “it was like getting to watch a great home run hitter take batting practice every day for an hour and a half.” And though ideas for songs may arrive anytime, Pug as a writer shows up to work at the outset of every day (when not touring), works on songs with only pen and paper, takes a lunch break, then sings and plays guitar in the afternoon.
“My normal routine is to write in the morning, when I get up, ‘til about lunchtime,” Pug said. “But with those scheduled writing things – you have to do it to maintain the tool, but I find that I very rarely get inspired ideas at that point. You get inspired ideas at other times, but you are only able to bring them to fruition if you have been doing the work in the morning.”
His discipline is paying off. Back in 2010, at the wizened age of 25, he told Paste magazine, “Youth is not necessarily an advantage, but a throbbing sense of wonder is. Wonder is common with youth, and skill is common with age. I suppose it’s a rare person who can maintain that wonder even after they’ve honed the skill. I hope to get there one day.”
That day has arrived. While the unadorned nature of Pug’s early work – extremely well-played acoustic guitar and a voice that is somehow both strong and exposed – is hard to rival on its own terms, Pug is now working on a larger canvas. After turning down major label offers in order to maintain his independence, he has signed with the small, artist friendly label, Lighting Rod Records. On the new record, Pug enlisted the producer Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Iron & Wine) to help create a more varied sonic soundscape, at times acoustically nuanced and at other times exploding into densely textured rock.
Lyrically, there is a deepening and a darkening going on – his influences on this record, he notes, tend more towards the sparseness of Raymond Carver, and he quietly slips in cutting social commentary on several songs (most beautifully and subversively on “The Servant’s Ace”). The title song, sung with The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, comes from a line in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “I love the great despisers because they are the great reverers and arrows of longing for the other shore.”
His sense of wonder remains intact, however, now tempered with some road-earned wisdom and a growing narrative drive. Pug delivers hymns and stories in the deft, carefully constructed vessels that are his songs. He has grown fully into one of our great living songwriters.
Earle has written that songwriters swing hammers. Pug is pounding away.
“That is the contribution that I get to make in our society, with a bunch of people in it…I am the one – I don’t stay in the same town all year, I just kind of go around and I see how people live – and it’s my job to kind of gestate those things and make them come out on the other side, in a poetic way,” Pug said. “People who don’t have time to think about these things because they have their own job and own roles to play, it’s my job to deliver that to them.”
A sense of grace and gratitude also pervades Pug’s music. This is man singing for his life, and loving every minute of it.
“Oh man, I have led, I lead, and I hope to live just a very charmed life,” Pug said. “I just get to do what I love for a living, constantly surrounded by people I love, whether it’s my family, or my girl, or the guys I work with, even down to my manager and my agent. I am just surrounded by people I love and trust and we get to do this job together that I love. And damn, I just really don’t think it gets any better than this.”
Joe Pug plays at the Satellite in Los Angeles April 27 at 9 p.m. See joepugmusic.com for more information.
