Joe Pug (photo by Ryan Nolan)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Joe Pug is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for March 2024. Look for more about him and his new album, Sketch of a Promised Departure, out March 8, all month long.
Joe Pug’s friend and neighbor Ted has a joke: I just want my son to be a bro in sales.
It’s a short, dark little joke, told between two dads.
Pug, the singer-songwriter, the podcaster, is also a parent of three young kids. Okay, he admits, maybe sales isn’t the most stable path, but his friend’s joke resonates: part of him wants his kids on a safer, more prescribed course than he took. Music is a risky business in several senses of the word, and Pug feels more than a little terror if he pictures his oldest — a 7-year-old boy — growing up to take the same chances Pug did in his 20s. It’s almost the last thing he wants his kid to experience firsthand. Almost.
“The only thing that’s more terrifying than that is him not taking any risk at all,” Pug says.
Then again, Pug’s reckless 20s, during which he chased the songwriter’s life with no parachute, paid off. Debut 2008 EP Nation of Heat spread faster than scrappy young Pug could tour. “The songs spread like gospel,” Matt Ruppert wrote in ND’s review of Nation of Heat | Revisited. “He traveled town to town on the back of seven suddenly well-known tunes, met by audiences already singing along.” The next year, Pug toured with Steve Earle, and his career took off in earnest. In the 15 years since, Pug has released a half-dozen albums, started the weekly podcast The Working Songwriter, and earned comparisons to vaunted singer-songwriters for his literary, working-class songcraft. His latest, Sketch of a Promised Departure, comes out March 8.
The process behind the new album has Pug considering how he got where he is today almost in baffled awe. He’s a seasoned songwriter, so he can explain his techniques and methods, but there’s still a nugget of mystery. How else would a 39-year-old songwriter look at his already well-examined life and still be surprised?
“I really can’t believe that I did it,” says Pug.
Breathing Room
As the origin story goes, Pug dropped out of the University of North Carolina and moved to Chicago, where he hardly knew a soul. First day there, Pug walked up to a job site and asked the general contractor for a job. He worked construction for $15 an hour during the day and played music at night. Eventually he dropped the laborer job and hit the road as a touring musician, scraping together a living at $100 or so a night.
“(I had) no backup plan, no college degree, no plan for anything besides the next couple of shows and the next album cycle,” Pug says.
Sketch explores Pug growing from that young adult, full of spark and enthusiasm and questionable judgment, to a full-fledged grown-up. His perspective throughout, though, is from almost-40, looking backwards. There’s hope and positivity, such as on “What Is Good Will Never Change” and the almost devotional “Treasury of Prayers,” but also folk-rock melancholy in “Heroes Pass Us By.” “Heroes pass us by / and we tell them that we love them / then we murder them in public every time,” Pug laments over a world-weary shuffle. “Children ask us why / but we never have an answer / we just hope that they’ll stop asking by and by.”
Sketch was the first album Pug recorded entirely in his home studio in Maryland. This allowed him to continue drafting his songs and toying with variation and nuance much later in the process than he had before. At its core, this is a financial thing. When you record in another person’s studio, Pug explains, you’re paying by the hour, so you show up with a finished version of a song and try to nail it in as few takes as possible. In his home studio, the creative process gets to breathe a little longer.
“Recording myself allows me to be unimpressed with results that I’ve come to. It allows me to discard them because I’m not under immense financial pressure,” Pug says. “I can really chase down ideas that are a bit more ephemeral. I can be in the very nascent stage of a drafting process for a song and not even have an intuition of whether it’s going to work or not and begin to record it.”
Pug talks about money in practical, pragmatic terms. There’s no tightrope between finances and artistic creativity. The same person who shrugged and walked up to a construction site to ask for work in his 20s is, in his late 30s, keeping afloat as a professional songwriter through his own distinct brand of hustle.
Rather than tour relentlessly (and miss his kids’ childhoods), Pug now instead relies on myriad sources of revenue, cobbled together to make a living wage. If you have songs people reliably stream, Spotify can bring in a few bucks, he notes. He handles all his merch in-house, mailing out any web orders himself. Live shows and live merch, obviously, bring in some income, too.
“The podcast is about 10 percent of my yearly gross revenue,” Pug adds, though that is not The Working Songwriter’s primary purpose. To be clear, Pug is genuinely interested in his fellow songwriters and wants to share their work in a positive light. Two things can be true, however, and thing number two is that Pug, the podcaster, introduces listeners to Pug, the songwriter.
“I was just actually in St. Louis last night,” he said during our late February interview. “A quarter of the people that were there had heard about the music from podcasts.”
As for the music itself, Pug never sold the publishing rights and owns all his songs. This enabled him to launch the Nation of Heat Vault, a subscription service containing every song, newsletter, and podcast episode he has produced. Started in 2023, it’s a new move, but Pug says it’s paying off.
“People signed up for that in a serious way,” he says. “I think in five to ten years, even very big artists are going to have some sort of offering that is subscription-based.”
Setting Up Surprises
As Pug looks at his 40th birthday next month — which he is celebrating with two nights of full-band shows at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music — it’s with the mind of a seasoned songwriter. He’s past the wild youthful spark that spawned Nation of Heat and into a more methodical, mature mode. It’s what happens, he says: If you’re lucky enough to continue as a musician past the youthful inspiration phase: You learn technique — often as a tradeoff.
“It’s not hard to write a bunch of words that rhyme. It’s not hard to come up with a narrative anymore. It’s not hard to come up with a riff on guitar. it’s fine,” Pug says. “What is hard is re-mystifying all that stuff so that as you’re working with it, you yourself are surprised in the same way that a listener is for the first time.”
So Pug takes a YouTube guitar lesson and boom: there’s an idea he didn’t have before. And so Pug listens to music — currently he’s digging Mike Viola’s The American Egypt and Jenny Owen Youngs’ Avalanche — and boom: another idea.
Yet there’s something beneath the tricks and techniques that’s thrilling to Pug. He feels like he’s on the cusp of a new creative mindset, one like he rode in his early 20s, only educated by the techniques he’s learned in the years since. He can kind of explain it, but it also sounds like an educated hunch, or a mystery he’d rather not tease apart and solve.
“I hope that where I’m going is to a place where the guiding force and the overall effect of the music is pure inspiration,” Pug says.
The mystique is coming back. He can feel it.
He’s excited.
