Feeling The Burn

It's almost precisely two years since American singer-songwriter Joe Pug made his first foray south to Australian shores, but he liked it here enough – and, most importantly, we reciprocated the feeling for the man and his elegant music enough – that his return voyage this month will mark his fourth time through Australian Customs with guitar case in hand. He's done the whole gamut of possible gigs while he's here – headline shows, festivals, opening for acts such as Justin Townes Earle and Wagons, you name it – but something about his sensitive, literate tunes has clearly enamoured Australian audiences in a relatively short space of time.

“I know, I've been down there three more times now since that first visit,” smiles the softly-spoken Pug. “I love coming down there – obviously I'm not a big fan of the flights, but after that's all said and done I love coming down for sure. I feel my stuff's really resonating well down there and if I knew why, I'd try and replicate it everywhere else. I feel like every audience I've had to build up here in the States and in Europe and the UK where I've had to painstakingly claw out every show and every fan, but Australia just seems to work itself. I wish I knew what it was, because I'd try to make it work the same way in other places, but the response has just been different in Australia to anywhere else.”

This visit marks the first time since the initial trip that Pug is coming armed with new music – he won us over with his 2010 debut album Messenger and now he's keen to build on that rapport with his second effort The Great Despiser. “I had a general idea of what I wanted, which is one of the main reasons that we chose to work with Brian Deck,” Pug explains of his initial vision for album number two and working with the producer who's helmed records for the likes of Modest Mouse, Iron & Wine and Califone. “I always felt that I was good at getting a song written, but never that good at getting it arranged and getting sort of a tapestry to put behind it to make it within a certain world. Listening to all of the things that he's put together, I knew that that was the direction in which I wanted to head and he really helped me decide what that was going to be.”

The Great Despiser – while still clearly Pug's baby – seems like more of a band effort than his debut, with more textures and relatively complex arrangements meaning that the songs aren't as reliant on his deft lyrics as in the past. “Absolutely, we just wanted to get to that point where we were firing on more cylinders than one,” he concurs. “The band has been with me for a fair amount of time now, but clearly it's now more integral to both the songs and the live show in certain ways. But all of the songs were still written on an acoustic guitar, so they can all be brought back to that.”

The album's title track finds Pug sharing vocal duties with none other than The Hold Steady's frontman Craig Finn, which Pug puts down to the song being perfect for that distinctive voice. “We finished doing that song and we all realised straight away what a debt that song – and the production of it – owed to The Hold Steady,” he recalls. “I'd met Craig several times on the road in different places and I just got a hold of him and asked him if he'd be at all interested in this idea for the song and he was. I still can't believe that he actually did it! He's a great guy and it's so cool that he would agree to do that.”

The new album's first single is the beautiful Hymn #76, continuing the titular tradition from Pug's first EP Nation Of Heat (2008), which contained standout track Hymn #101 as well as a tune titled Hymn #35. “You know, I really think that those three songs are cut from the same cloth – to me they're different movements of the same song,” Pug reflects. “Those are written the most unconsciously out of all my songs and those are the ones that I really seem to understand the least myself. I just feel that those three songs, when they got finished I had no idea where they came from. In some ways I feel sometimes like I have very little pride in those songs, because I really feel so different from them. I feel completely divorced from them, like I didn't have anything to do with them really. It's bizarre. I wish it happened more than it does, but you try to do a lot of things consciously so that you have the muscles developed to do something unconsciously.

“I generally have to pore over my lyrics a good amount to get things the way that I like them – I find that pretty hard. To me that's actually the hardest part of the whole process. The best songs arrive fully-formed, but you don't get those songs without dragging out other songs and just beating a dead horse on songs that will never work. You work on that for about three weeks and if you stay true to it, then eventually another song will slip out in about 30 seconds, you know – and they're often the keepers.”

In this post-Dylan, post-Beatles world it's considered imperative for any singer worth their salt to go through such travails whilst writing their own music, as distinct from the early years of popular music when the singer and the songwriter were rarely the same person. “It's funny that the same person has to do both jobs, because I find that they're so different from one another,” Pug muses. “I feel like I'm at a point now where I fully appreciate that difference and that's why I'm excited to get back into the studio soon – I feel that I have a much better idea now of what makes a session work, as compared to what makes a good show work.

“I didn't really mind the fact that there was a time in this business when some people would write and some people would sing – I think that makes a lot of sense. I happen to like doing both, but I know a lot of people who like to grumble about pop stars not writing their own songs, but to me a pop star shouldn't write their own songs. It makes sense that someone can communicate with an audience and someone else can be solitary and come up with an idea for a song that helps them do tha. It makes total sense to me that two different people with two different temperaments would do those different jobs.”

Joe Pug will be playing the following shows:

Wednesday 21 & Thursday 22 November - Workers Club, Melbourne VIC
Friday 23 November - Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW
Saturday 24 November - The Waiting Room, Brisbane QLD
Sunday 25 November - Mullum Music Festival, Mullumbimby VIC