Joe Pug

Truth be told, the only reason I found out about Joe Pug, was because I’m obsessed with small, ugly dogs and my friends know it. One of them e-mailed me a link to the songwriter’s MySpace and the rest of the story consists of me listening to his latest release, Nation of Heat, over and over again. The Chicago dweller possesses a brand of literary Americana that a lot of people shoot for and fall embarassingly short of. I can’t decide which name to drop in comparison. Johnny Cash? Bob Dylan? Tom Waits? Woody Guthrie? Maybe a little bit of all of them stirred up with a sorrowful Langhorne Slim and a stripped down Josh Ritter. The old soul’s staying in the mid and far west for now, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.

mp3: Hymn #101