Joe Pug likes writing songs, and you like listening to them. So there. Photo by .
has a voice that yearns to be heard. The Chicago-based songwriter was hardly on the map a year ago as he crisscrossed the U.S., yet now his songs are favorites overseas and his shows are hot tickets across America.
Like other great songwriters of his generations – Josh Ritter and the Tallest Man on Earth included – itap easy to quote Pug’s lyrics to illustrate the point of his brilliance.
“Before we met I knew we’d meet.”
“We got $2 soldiers and $10 words.”
“I have come to test the timbre of my heart.”
Pug plays Thursday at in Boulder and Friday at , and we caught up with him to talk about his delightful lack of a day job, his playwriting past and his desire for a full-length record.
Question: Was Chicago as a scene and a community integral to you growing as a songwriter?
Answer: Itap treated me really well. In the last year, Chicago has embraced me. I spent about three years working toward that, but even in smaller markets like Champaign and Rock Island, Iowa City and Ann Arbor and Madison – they’ve all been supportive as well.
Q: It sounds like a great, central place to be a touring songwriter.
A: If you wanted to you could be working musician in a 500-mile radius of Chicago.
Chicago has a long history of songwriters, with Steve Goodman and John Prine in the early-’80s, but there hasn’t been anyone recently.
Q: Tell me about your last name. It seems unusual.
A: Itap actually Pugliese, but Pug had always been my nickname growing up, and I figured I liked the ring of that. My family’s originally from Puglia, a region in Italy. I’m excited because I’m going down there for my first time. I’ll be playing in Milan, Rome and Florence.
Q: This year has been huge for you with festivals, larger rooms and more fans. How’s it been from the inside?
A: When it rains, it pours. You work and work and work, and everything sort of happens at once. Itap been great, and the coolest part about it, beside all the cools shows I’ve gotten to play and the cool people I’ve been able to meet and play with, is that I’ve been able to quit my job and make a living doing this.
Q: Thatap huge. What were you doing?
A: I was a carpenter for a long time, but that fell on hard times and by the time I quit working a straight job I was working for a salvage company, taking out stained glass and really nice crown moldings from mansions. We did a lot of those, and the last job I worked on for them was a really new house, and I tore a panel off the wall, and sometimes carpenters will write the date on the back of things, and it had been remodeled and flipped recently – this millon-dollar remodeling job that had never been used before. Seeing something like that, it was no wonder we hit the crash that we hit.
Q: Writing and singing songs sounds like a better job.
A: Yeah, and I hope a lot of good things are to come. But itap hard being on the road. You have to be away from the people you love when you’re on the road, and it can get boring – I spend more time driving than anything else. But at the end of the day, itap like running a small business, and you’re your own boss.
Q: Tell me about studying playwriting at the University of North Carolina.
A: I spent three years there, and I got to put a couple of those plays up. Chapel Hill is a really good school. Itap the reason I went there – they had a reputation for mounting undergraduate student productions. A play isn’t complete until itap put on its feet in front of an audience. I learned a lot about writing there. And I learned that writing plays isn’t for me. Itap a much more detailed process, and I don’t know that I have the mind for that. Songs are only three minutes long, and they have their own self-contained logic and their own rules.
Q: Were you writing songs at the same time you were writing plays?
A: No, I played music when I was younger, but I have a hard time doing two things at once. I went in writing plays and then took a clean break, and there were six months where I didn’t do much at all. And then I got into writing songs. (My playwriting past) does inform the way I write songs, but more than anything else, it was just developing writing habits – 95 percent of writing is the habits you develop.
Q: What do you think is most important for a young songwriter who is first finding his or her way?
A: I look at a lot of the kids getting started, and I think too much time is spent writing one or two songs – and then itap like, ‘Oh, I have to figure out what the MySpace page should look like and how to market this and get some opening gigs.’ If you’re going to make a living doing this, you have to have a good manager and agent, but all of that will follow if you’re really good at what you do and spend time on. Itap important to not to put the cart before the horse.
Q: You released an EP, and now you’re giving away another EP for free on your website. But whatap the story on a full-length record?
A: The full-length is done and recorded. I heard the last mixes yesterday, and we’ll be sending it off to Kitchen Mastering in Durham, North Carolina, on Monday. In all likelihood, it’ll be out in January or February.
Q: Do you have a label in mind or are you self-releasing it?
A: That will be resolved in the next two weeks. We’re talking to a company right now, but we feel good either way.
Q: Do you feel good about the songs on the LP? Is it your grand artistic statement?
A: I’ve sat with these songs for a long time, but is it a grand artistic statement? I got wrapped up in that idea early on in writing this record, and the only way I made any headway was to let go of that. When I wrote ‘Nation of Heat’ I wasn’t thinking that way, and it sort of came together. When working on this one, I found that the more I swing for the fences, the more cliché the songs got and simple and stupid they’d get. When you’re going for that, any shade of nuance goes out the window. And I’m really proud that I was able to let go of that.
Q: You’ve played some pretty big festivals, from Bonnaroo to Mile High and Newport. Does that avenue work for you as an acoustic artist?
A: I had to do a lot of learning over the summer, of how to do play a festival. But by the end of the summer, I had learned how to pace the set and interact with the audiences in a certain way. I’m not gonna lie, itap not an ideal setting, especially when I’m playing without my band. Newport was the culmination of that. It was the perfect storm of the audience coming in and being really excited and I was really prepared, and I had a really good show.
Q: You played the big Swallow Hill party here months ago at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, and now you’re coming back to play their smaller folk-oriented space. Have you found that folk music/roots organizations have embraced your music more than audiences at rock clubs?
A: I’m not gonna lie, the places I most love to play are the rock clubs. That being said, I’ve gotten amazing support from all sorts of roots organizations, the Ark in Ann Arbor has really gotten behind me. And out of nowhere, Denver is one of my biggest cities right now, and itap due in no small part to Swallow Hill. They have such a dedicated listenership that itap worth it for me.
Q: But you prefer rock clubs?
A: I like it that the audiences are a little less polite and I have to do a little more to pull them in. I like it when people are standing up and drinking beer. I like it because a lot of the bands that I’ve liked over the years have gone through those clubs, and itap great when I see their names on the dressing room walls.
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Ricardo Baca is the founder and co-editor of and an award-winning critic and journalist at The Denver Post. He is also the executive director of the , Colorado’s premier indie music festival. Follow his whimsies at , his live music habit at and his iTunes addictions at .
