Seeking (and Sought) with Joe Pug

And I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to see that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind
To reach forward and behind
For the more I seek, the more I’m sought
Yeah, the more I seek, the more I’m sought

—“Hymn 101” (2008)

The American singer-songwriter Joe Pug is an inheritor not only of Dylan’s enigmatic songwriting but of his spiritual seeking as well, of “the search” that Walker Percy’s narrator describes in The Moviegoer—a search for existential meaning and direction in life. I don’t know exactly what Pug had in mind when he wrote the above lyrics in “Hymn 101”—many of the lyrics on that first EP, Nation of Heat, are inscrutable in the best, Dylanesque way. Looking back at them, though, seventeen years and eight albums later, they seem to me a key to opening one aspect of Pug’s music and seeing a strong thread that runs through it. Pug’s career has followed this path of searching doggedly and charts a course to follow for all of us who are “on the way” as pilgrims on earth.

Even on his earliest records, Pug’s seeking was colored with a desire for grace and the divine. “Hymn 101,” where the idea of seeking is introduced in his music, also ends with a look forward toward fulfillment in God’s grace. In the last line of the song, Pug sings, “Will you recognize my face when God’s awful grace / Strips me of my jacket and my vest / And reveals all the treasure in my chest.” On these early records, though, God’s grace feels almost secondary, a means to a poetic end rather than the end of the search itself. In “Bury Me Far (from My Uniform),” a soldier killed in war rejects being held up as a national symbol and repeatedly makes the request, “Bury me far from my uniform / So God might remember my face.” This last line is striking but on the whole not the focus of the song. Rather, the idea of God remembering the soldier’s face is used as a poetic way to counter the co-opting of the soldier’s life as a symbol of national pride. This is not to criticize the song, which is as affecting as any anti-war song and emphasizes the dignity of the individual, but to point out the role of grace in Pug’s earlier songs.

There are some other allusions to the divine on Nation of Heat, Messenger, and The Great Despiser, but the richness and density of these albums often stretches in other directions and remains frequently opaque. Then, with 2015’s Windfall, Pug’s lyrical searching became emphatically stronger. In the opening track, “Bright Beginnings,” he sings, “All I have I would happily give / To stand there with you now / To stand there with you ever.” The song is a love song of a sort, and isn’t explicitly a song about “standing with” the divine. But there is a desire to do what the Gospel commands—to find what is of great worth and give up everything else to obtain it. While the “pearl” of “Bright Beginnings” is not explicitly heaven, there is an opening of that all-giving desire.

This is reinforced in “The Measure,” in which Pug sings that “all we lost is nothing to what we found.” The search remains alive and reinvigorated on “If Still It Can’t Be Found” (2015) when he sings:

There’s a road I have known I could always find
If I walked ahead, I could look behind
If I fell behind I could always know

If it’s not around this corner it’s around the next
If it’s not beyond this river it’s beyond the rest
And if still it can’t be found
It’s probably for the best

There’s a hand I have known I could always hold
Through the night so long, through the day so fair
If I lost my grip, I would not despair

The yearning for a path to follow is explicit here, as is the idea of seeking and the conviction that the road exists and can be found. This search breaks open in a new way on Pug’s following album. The Flood in Color marks a new place of being overwhelmed by grace—not to the place of understanding or response, but a necessary breakdown and stripping away. In “The Letdown” (2019), Pug sings:

Brace yourself for the letdown
The Holy Ghost with his hands out
No peace on earth is cheaply found
Do you see my colors now?

The explicit movement of the Holy Spirit will eventually bring peace, but only through tumult and suffering.

“The Flood in Color” begins with a “clap of lightning” and narrates an overpowering flood. Everything the narrator knows, his comfort and his home, is being washed away. Yet the song is not a melancholic wallowing. Notice that the flood is in “color” after we’ve been asked to “see my colors” in “The Letdown.” On The Flood in Color, there is a sense of being sought—hounded, even—by the Holy Spirit through the flood, the letdown, the hard-found peace that he promises. The flood itself is not precisely the comforting water of baptism, but it is the purification that makes ready the new creation.

The grace that fills up this purified space comes in 2021 on The Diving Sun. The lyrics of “Deep End” (“If not now then when / Shut up, jump in / Both feet, deep end”) sound like a call to plunge into the mercy that is the subject of the EP’s final track. The lyrics of “Ten Miles of Mercy” (2021) read like Pug’s own version of “Amazing Grace”:

How I have sailed on tops of the waves
While others were taken asunder
How I was saved from a journey depraved and wretched
I often have wondered.

But even rebirth, repentance, and grace do not leave us perfectly content on earth. We are still broken, struggling against sin and suffering in this life. In “Outlaw” (2021), he sings:

I thought I was an outlaw, but I couldn’t bear the shame
I couldn’t bear the shame and spite the master
. . .
I thought I was a witness, but I couldn’t speak his name
No, I couldn’t speak his name when most it mattered.

Pug acknowledges that he is not a rebel in the cliched, stereotyped sense, but he is not yet a “witness,” either. This song emphasizes the ongoing nature of any conversion—our private conviction often precedes our ability to stand up and witness to it. Our hearts are in constant need of renewal and reconversion. Even after the grace that comes when we jump into the deep end, each one of us is still a pilgrim on the way, and Pug recognizes this ongoing tension, especially as a musician who continues to occupy a place in the secular Americana music world.

Pug’s most recent album, 2024’s Sketch of a Promised Departure, marks yet another step forward on the path of seeking. While it is not a complete arrival at a destination, there is something like a newfound comfort or confidence in the journey. What Pug finds in part after his seeking on earlier records is that the journey itself is part of the destination—that, in the words of Catherine of Siena, “all the way to heaven is heaven.” Pug delivers Sketch of a Promised Departure from the posture of a pilgrim rather than that of a lost wanderer.

Even the cover art suggests this understanding of the record. The image depicts a traveler from behind with a bright yellow circle in front of him above an empty plane. The orb is at once the overwhelming sun, a halo, and a celestial eschaton, illuminating countless pilgrims on their ascent in front of our own central traveler.

One of the album’s tracks, “Then the Rain Came,” brings us back to the image of the flood, this time with stronger baptismal and salvific imagery: “I was thirsty, who would fill my cup? / A single sip, a taste was not enough.” While the rain in “The Flood in Color” was overwhelming and destructive, the rain of “Then the Rain Came” fills Pug’s empty cup, revives and gives new life. I see them as the same rain, and the opening lines and imagery parallel each other in the two songs. The pain of losing what we cling to is real and in its own way costly, but it is also requisite to open us up to new life and nourishment for the journey.

The song “Treasury of Prayers” (2024) more than any other on the record is delivered from a posture of faith and yearning. In it, Pug sings a litany of prayers, including “that faithful’s not a word that I cannot define” and “that the age of grace begins where the age of reason stops.” At the same time, these prayers aren’t all what we would think of as the perfect prayers of a saint:

That I find my will to fight, that I lose my taste for drink
And if that’s too much to ask, that my hangovers are brief
That while we’re here on earth I can keep the difference hid
Between what I should have done and what I really did.

The song demonstrates a recognition of the singer’s own imperfection, which any honest person must have, while desiring truth, beauty, and virtue. Toward the end of the song, Pug sings, “That it feels just like a memory when my father calls me home / Like I’m racing under streetlights back to dinner on the stove.” More than any other song, this feels like the goal of his years-long search is finally found.

In all of this, Pug has not lost or compromised his place in Americana music. He remains the consummate working songwriter: releasing independent music, hosting the best songwriting podcast online, traveling the country and playing in small venues like St. Paul’s Turf Club, talking directly with his listeners. Through the craft of his songs, Joe Pug charts a desire for truth, a sincerity in seeking, and an openness to being sought and found. Wherever we are on our search, Pug provides a perfect soundtrack for the way.