Catching Up With... Joe Pug

Photo by Todd Roeth

I’ve always written with headphones on. Originally it was a way to block out a noisy college apartment, but that quickly morphed into a source of inspiration and atmosphere. I listen to every genre but have a particular fascination—not surprisingly—with songwriters who bring a storyteller’s eye: Steve Earle, Josh Ritter, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Patterson Hood, M. Ward. To that list—and right to the front—I now add Joe Pug. One of my closest friends, also a writer, gave me Pug’s latest release, Messenger, this spring. We talk music constantly, catch a lot of shows, trade a lot of recommendations. His take on Joe Pug was less recommendation and more insistence: You’ve got to hear this guy.

That’s the word I’ve been spreading since first listen. Pug’s career path—from his decision to release the excellent Nation of Heat EP for free to the way he secured the swift and sincere admiration of top-tier peers such as Ritter, Earle and Ward while still in his early 20s—has garnered plenty of attention, but his music stands on its own, no hype needed. I got in touch with Pug seeking permission to quote some lyrics in an upcoming novel, and once I had his ear I couldn’t help but ask for the opportunity to pick his brain. He graciously agreed, and you’ll see in his interview answers exactly what you’ll hear in his music: depth of thought, absence of pretension and a love of his craft.

Michael Koryta: I get the young-writer questions a lot, so it’s fun to be able to turn it around. Have you felt any resistance because of your age or do you catch more of the opposite, the “you seem to have lived so much beyond your years…”
Joe Pug: Probably, the latter.

Koryta: In “Unsophisticated Heart,” you sing, “My eyes will be hardened, my voice will be guarded, my mind so bewildered.” Do you think much about the advantages or disadvantages of youth in your writing, what you say and how you say it and how those things might change in time?
Pug: 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.

Koryta: You released an EP, Nation of Heat, for free. Do you see ways in which that decision helped, commercially and artistically?
Pug: The more records we give away, the more records we sell. I wasn’t around for the gilded age of the music business, so this is the only model I know.

Koryta: You’ve been touring extensively, logging a lot of road miles and late nights. Good for the creative soul, or does it exhaust you to the point that you’ll need to step aside for a time to focus on songwriting?
Pug: Traveling allows you to gather. Little scenes. Personalities. Situations. Truisms. It’s a true wealth of experience. But that experience is just raw, unpolished ore. So you go home, sleep in your own bed, write at your own desk, drink coffee from your own urn. Once that mundane stuff is consistent, your mind is free to organize, cut, polish.

Koryta: Your songwriting seems filled with literary techniques and allusions to me. What do you read?
Pug: Walt Whitman. Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Raymond Carver. Annie Dillard. John Dos Passos. Cormac McCarthy. Little bit of Somerset Maughm. Shakespeare and the New Testament with varying degrees of success. I read the paper every day, I read The New Yorker every week. Come to think of it, I read more than I write!

Koryta: You’ve toured with some tremendous talents—Josh Ritter and Justin Townes Earle to name a couple. How has watching those guys, seeing their approach, and talking with them impacted what you do?
Pug: It’s really been a finishing school for a performing songwriter. You watch the way they interact with their audience, pace their sets, arrange their bands, dress, eat. Everything. You learn by emulating people you admire, and eventually it becomes a style and sensibility of your own.

Koryta: Clearly, there’s respect and admiration in those relationships. But do you feel any sort of competitive spark as well?
Pug: No. I’ve never looked at it like that.

Koryta: There’s a line in “How Good You Are”: “Everything that you were meant for, everything that you were born to do, does not need you to do it, someone else was born to do it, too.” How does that relate—if it does at all—to your evolution as an artist? How do you face down those dark nights of the soul when you’re considering your role in an art that’s both a damned difficult business and loaded with talented songwriters?
Pug: I think that it’s a very liberating thought. That you don’t necessarily matter. That humanity will keep on rolling down the line whether you decide to participate or not. It keeps you humble, and workmanlike.

Koryta: Many artists, novelists or songwriters or actors, seem very concerned with how they pace their output—they want to do one a year at all costs to stay on the audience consciousness or they fear doing one a year for the perception of being too prolific. What’s your approach to this?
Pug: That’s a question that I’m grappling with right now. I don’t know that I have an answer.

Koryta: Who are a few key influences who might not show up to the untrained ear in your songs?
Pug: I think that would be John Hiatt. I borrow heavily from his melodic sense. And I borrow heavily from his narrative structures. I just plain love his music and always have.

Koryta: Empathy seems to be a critical aspect of your songwriting—a shifting to a perspective away from your own, or an expression of regret for failing to do so. Is this a conscious challenge, to ask yourself to consider the things in your songs from perspectives other than your own, and are you hoping to pass that challenge along to the audience?
Pug: There’s not a whole lot of conscious challenges or premeditation in my work. And I don’t mean in the hippy-dippy, “I write and whatever comes out is valid” sense. I just mean that I spend great deal of time thinking about which words sound nice together, and absolutely no time thinking about what I’d like a listener to feel. Anytime a writer begins considering how they’d like to affect somebody it becomes some kind of weird, emotional propaganda. And I’ll tell you what… audiences aren’t stupid. They can sense when they’re being manipulated. And they resent it.

Koryta: Ever worry about the separation of artist and person blurring? I mean, night after night, you’re the guy up there on stage, singing smart, wise things, lights on you, audience focus on you. Do you worry that role can infect your personal life negatively in any way?
Pug: Yeah man. That’s some strange stuff. Luckily, the few people I’m close with keep it real. They don’t expect profundity. They expect profanity.

Michael Koryta is the author of six novels, most recently So Cold the River, and his work has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Great Lake Books Award, and St. Martin’s Press/PWA Best First Novel prize, while also earning nominations for the Edgar, Quill, Shamus and Barry awards. In addition to winning the Los Angeles Times prize for best mystery, his novel Envy the Night was selected as a Reader’s Digest condensed book. His work has been translated into nearly twenty languages. A former private investigator and newspaper reporter, Koryta graduated from Indiana University with a degree in criminal justice. He currently lives in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Bloomington, Indiana. His next novel, The Cypress House, will be released by Little, Brown and Co. in January 2011. Learn more at michaelkoryta.com