Life > January 17, 2008

By Erik Forseth | Contributing writer

Artists in exile are a pretty compelling lot. OK, I’m kind of thinking of Jesse Winchester here, but he’s a pretty compelling guy, and anyway, it doesn’t take long to add a few names to the list: Townes Van Zandt, Fela Kuti, the Rolling Stones circa Exile on Main St.

Songwriter Pug delves into a variety of genres within his unique new EP. (Courtesy myspace.com/thejoepug)

My definition of exile is a little broad, but whether self-imposed or otherwise, each of these musicians was displaced for a while in one way or another, and each of them has a hell of a body of work to show for it.

Well, Joe Pug fits the bill. His Web site (www.joepugmusic.com) gives only scant biographical details which amount to: Joe grew up in my great home state of Maryland, spent a few years going to college in North Carolina but dropped out to move to Chicago, where he’s now a songwriter who daylights as a carpenter.

I didn’t say that backwards; Joe is a songwriter. And at no more than 23, he’s the real deal.

Comparisons to contemporary singer-songwriters won’t get me very far in describing the Joe Pug EP he’s just released. He’s no Sufjan Stevens.

I guess that might turn a bunch of you off, which is unfortunate, but I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about this man.

The songs I’ve heard place him squarely in a much richer tradition — where comparisons to Dylan seem natural but are maybe a bit naïve — populated by songwriters like John Prine, Jesse Winchester, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark or even Paul Westerberg.

Type his name into a search engine, and you’re bound to find comparisons to Woody or Arlo Guthrie, according to taste. These same reviews call Joe “scary good.”

Now that I’ve already “insulted your intelligence by telling you who Pug will remind you of”— one of the reviewers quoted on Joe’s Web site has more faith in you than I do — I guess I’d better at least talk about the EP itself. The disc is comprised of seven exquisitely written songs, including, by my count, two protest songs (“Nation of Heat” and “I Do My Father’s Drugs”), two absolutely visionary “hymns” (“Hymn 101” and “Hymn 35”), the autobiographical “Nobody’s Man” and two songs about love, or love lost, or whatever you’d like to call it (“Call It What You Will,” appropriately, and “Speak Plainly, Diana”).

Don’t let me convince you that these songs are easy to get a handle on, though, because I’d be deceiving you.

“Speak Plainly, Diana,” is nothing if not devastating and overwhelming, but it’s also pretty enigmatic: “There’s no safety, Diana / and there’s nobody to blame / even daylight will surprise you / even dreams will end the same.”

Lester Bangs ended his famous essay on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks by juxtaposing a Van Morrison verse with part of a Federico García Lorca poem.

I’ve always loved that, and, besides, I don’t know of any better way to do justice to Joe Pug’s writing:

And I’ve come to know the wish list of my father

I have come to know the shipwrecks where he wished

I have come to wish aloud

Among the overdressed crowd

Come to witness now the sinking of the ship

Throwing pennies from the sea top next to it

-Joe Pug

And least will guess that with our bones

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow

Above the shuttered mansion-house,

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

-Wallace Stevens