Joe Pug was 13, still going by his given name of Joe Pugliese, and still in North Carolina with his family on the day things changed.
“My dad gave me the first John Prine record,” said Pug, now 26 and the author of a literate, poetic album called Messenger that has wedged him into the national music consciousness. “I’d never heard anything like that before. In a way, it was unfathomable to me that someone could write a song that would be as clear as a well-written book. I mean, I knew exactly what he was saying, immediately.”
Pug didn’t take that information as license to try and write like Prine. But he took it to mean that there are still musical and lyrical angles left to be discovered. With Messenger, he has emerged as a singer-songwriter emboldened by influences Prine, Bob Dylan and John Hiatt, but not particularly weighted by anything he’s heard before.
“Before this tour, I didn’t travel at all with a band,” said Pug, who plays The Basement in Nashville on Wednesday, July 14. “It was just a dude with a guitar, and I’m well aware of how boring that sounds. It’s something I’ve spent every waking moment these last five years thinking about: ‘How can I write songs and go out and play them and make these things interesting?’ I got a master class in that recently, being out on the road opening for Steve Earle. I watched his show probably 100 times: He played solo, and kept the audience in rapt attention for 120 minutes.”
By all indications, Pug is catching on. He’s up for a new and emerging artist trophy at the Americana Music Association’s Americana Honors & Awards show in September, he’s now headlining his own tour with a full band that includes ace Nashville multi-instrumentalist Bucky Baxter and Messenger has been praised to the moon by dozens of publications.
Some stories focus on his unusual path to notoriety. Pug dropped out of college, moved to Chicago, worked as a carpenter and won fan interest by mailing out free CDs (not downloads, actual discs) to anyone interested.
But those decisions would have played out lousily were it not for his jagged, melodic and thoughtful songs, and so the songs are really the story. On Messenger’s “How Good You Are,” he challenges a conquest-driven artist’s notion of destiny: “Everything that you were meant for, everything you were born to do/ Does not need you to do it,” he sings. “Someone else was born to do it, too.”
Then there’s a surreal bit about an elderly, troublesome butler who keeps repeating the word, “Alive.”
“You ask him please to go/ There’s one thing you should know/ He carved ‘April the 7th, ‘65’ into the side of your piano,” Pug sings. And, so, what’s the significance of that date?
“Well, when people are interpreting lyrics to anybody’s songs, never underestimate the power of meter,” he said, declining to state a reason for the butler’s carving.
An online search revealed April 7, 1965 as the date then-president Lyndon Johnson gave a famous speech regarding Vietnam. The title of the speech? “Peace Without Conquest.”
“Seriously?” Pug asked, when told of the Johnson speech. “Wait, go back to the part of the article you just wrote down, and tell everybody I was talking about that speech. Man, that’s pretty epic.”
Reach Peter Cooper at 615-259-8220 or pcooper@tennessean.com.
IF YOU GO
- What: Joe Pug, with Rayland Baxter
When: 9 p.m., Wed., July 14
Where: The Basement, 1604 8th Ave. S.
Tickets: $8