Song of My Self-Emptying
Joe Pug’s latest album carries forward the themes of his 2009 debut with the weight of accumulated age and experience.
Review by Matt Miller
In 2009, a then-25-year-old Joe Pug released his debut EP, Nation of Heat, which has since become something of a legend among a certain set of folkies. Like many notable albums there’s a mystique around the EP due to the circumstances of its production, with Pug—then working as a carpenter in Chicago—sneaking into a studio to record during time when other musicians had cancelled, then adopting the once-novel strategy of giving the album away for free. Nation of Heat is mainly notable, however, for the quality of Pug’s songwriting, which then and since drew comparisons to the likes of Bob Dylan and John Prine. Pug himself named literary sources like Walt Whitman and Raymond Carver as his primary influences, as with the lead track on the EP, “Hymn #35,” which he referred to in an interview with Rolling Stone as “the palest imitation of ‘Leaves of Grass’ in recorded history!” Read one stanza of the song and you can see what he means:
I am the disappointed kiss
I am the unexpected harvest
I am the old Kentucky home
I am the son who runs the farthest
I have done wrong, I will do wrong
There’s nothin’ wrong with doin’ wrong
And I am faith, I am belief
Except for when I’m not
I am the teeth of champions
I am rust and water rot
It’s not hard to hear the echoes of Whitman’s transcendentalism here: the blithe assertion of a right to contradict oneself, the tendency to make the individual self the measure of all things. Even in rhetorical style, the song echoes the method of Whitman’s poetry, building up a picture of the narrator through a series of personal assertions and images. The songs on Nation of Heat occasionally offer hints of something more than self-actualization as a goal—“I Do My Father’s Drugs” carries a sly political critique, as does the title track—yet on the whole, Pug’s early “hymns” operate comfortably as expressions of a quintessentially American individualism. In an interview with PopMatters, Pug summarized his central theme as “the individual being the only thing you can be sure is real in yourself.”
Fifteen years later, however, while Pug’s songwriting remains just as fascinated by the narrative of the individual, he appears to have undergone something of a change. When he re-recorded Nation of Heat with a full band in 2022, the antinomian lines “I have done wrong, I will do wrong / There’s nothin’ wrong with doin’ wrong” are delivered differently. On the original recording, they are a shout of defiance, but the older Pug offers them up as a wry acknowledgment of human frailty.
For Joe Pug, it may turn out that the self-emptying impulse is where the best songs can be found.
The fullest expression of Pug’s shift in sensibility has only arrived, however, with his latest album of original songs. On Sketch of a Promised Departure, out in March of 2024, Pug retains the declamatory poetic style of Whitman, but grafts into that sensibility something that sounds less like the sovereign self of transcendentalism, and more like the humble submission of kenosis.
The shift from transcendentalist to kenotic language begins with the very first track of the album, “Fast Asleep Inside the Garden,” which depicts the private suffering of a Christlike narrator:
All my friends are fast asleep, dead to dreams as they promised not to be
Don’t tell me how it ends, I think I know, they’re out for blood and here I am alone
Fast asleep inside the garden, all my hope has taken wing
As I sing the song I don’t want to sing
Where individuality in Pug’s earlier work was a source of strength, here it becomes a burden. Rather than freely singing a “Song of Myself,” the speaker of this song is forced, alone, into a song of lament. Combined with the religious subtext of the song, it marks a distinct shift in Pug’s key themes away from the sovereignty of the individual and toward an acceptance of sacrifice for the common good.
Other songs continue Pug’s habit of commenting obliquely on politics and culture, such as “What Is Good Will Never Change”:
What is good will never change
You can lie and say it does
You can overturn a statue
You can drag it through the mud
Far above this broken city
There’s a beauty that remains
Or consider “Prisoner’s Song”:
They’re calling for justice, the kind that has teeth
The kind that has both eyes to see
For what good is revenge if it’s wasted on men
Who won’t drag weaker men through the street
Pug would never write a protest song—he’s too in love with narrative and imagery to craft something so obvious—and yet the political subtext of these songs is clear. Both express a distaste at the hasty rush to judgment often promoted in our contemporary political culture, whether aimed at works of art or flesh and blood. Accordingly, they assume a human frailty and sense of tragedy that’s not consistent with a Whitmanesque optimistic individualism.
The album reaches its fullest expression of Pug’s new theme with the lead single “Treasury of Prayers.” Like Pug’s earlier “hymn” tracks, it is an epigrammatic song that builds up a portrait of a character through images—a “Song of Myself.” Yet the sensibility is altogether different. The song begins:
That my enemies are slow, that my fevers are weak
That my lessons don’t hurt, that my medicine is sweet
That these days are not the pearls, and I am not the swine
That faithful’s not a word that I cannot define
As the song continues, the narrator’s prayers heap up:
That my children live out stories they can tell around a fire
That they can recognize beauty, that they can recognize a liar
That their innocence remains, that they never question my love
That they work to build cathedrals they won’t live to pray inside of
Although the rhetorical posture here remains consistent with the self-assertive early Pug, on “Treasury of Prayers,” the speaker’s posture has moved from a confident antinomianism to a wry acknowledgement of his failings; and rather than seeking the certainty of the individual, the song probes the frail hope of handing on a legacy to one’s descendants. Rather than captivating a “nation of heat” with his bold self-presentation, this narrator humbly seeks to give himself over to an “age of grace.” I wouldn’t say that Pug’s songwriting has left Whitman behind, but as his lyrics have matured he has grafted onto that exuberant influence something more like the self-criticism of the late Auden: “You shall love your crooked neighbor / With your crooked heart.”
In Sketch of a Promised Departure, we hear the voice of a songwriter who’s grown into middle age and fatherhood—who’s been mugged out of a sense of endless possibility and into the world-wearied acceptance of his failings and his need to give himself away. Yet in that chastened moral realism, Pug seems to have found a new creative spark, as the roots magazine No Depression observes: “The mystique is coming back. He can feel it.” For Joe Pug, it may turn out that the self-emptying impulse is where the best songs can be found.
Matt Miller is a native Nebraskan who serves as Associate Professor of English at College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri. His first book, an essay collection titled Leaves of Healing, will appear from Belle Point Press in late 2024. Find him online at matt-miller.org.
Sketch of a Promised Departure was released on March 1, 2024. You can stream it if you want, but we recommend buying it from the artist here.
