Joe Pug is a singer-songwriter known for his lyrical acumen and plaintive harmonica style. Host Bryan Russo talks with him about his music and journey as a song writer. Pug appears this evening January 9th at the Avalon Theatre.
Joe Pug performs this evening at the Stoltz Listening Room inside the Avalon Theatre in Easton, Maryland.
Ticket information can be found here: https://www.avalonfoundation.org/event/joe-pug
More information about Joe Pug is here: https://joepugmusic.com/
RUSSO: Like many professional singer songwriters, Joe Pug spent the vast majority of his twenties in a van traveling the country and singing his songs for anyone who would listen. But now, almost 20 years into his career, he says he values the memories and the lessons of the journey just as much as he remembers all of the destinations he's traveled to. I'm Bryan Russo. Pug was born and raised in Greenbelt, Maryland, and he started down a path that probably no one would've guessed, would've led him to eventually becoming a critically acclaimed songwriter. He studied theater at UNC Chapel Hill before dropping out, and then on a whim moving to Chicago where he took a gig as a carpenter. But it was in the Windy City where pugs started to take songwriting seriously. And just like his idol, John Prine, Joe Pug leveraged the city's open mic circuit to craft his debut EP Nation of Heat, which catapulted him from obscurity into the spotlight as critics praised his songwriting for its literary depth and its unflinching storytelling.
RUSSO (cont.): Soon, the album found its way into the hands of Americana legend Steve Earl, who invited Pug to open for him on a tour all over Europe in the US. And then for the next several years, the road was Joe Pug's home. He logged countless miles and he says over 200 shows a year. But as he entered his thirties, the songwriter from Greenbelt started a new journey, one as a husband and then as a dad. And that's when he says he realized that his art was going to take on a new role in his life.
PUG: So when I first started, I didn't have a family and I wasn't married yet, so I could just run the business every year and basically not turn a profit. Everything went back into the band. When I had kids and I had to get a mortgage and all that, I had to start turning a profit. And so basically what ended up happening, all those different jobs, I'd look at it and be like, well, that person wants $10,000. And I could probably do this with 25 hours of my own time.
RUSSO: This new DIY approach to his life as a touring middle class singer songwriter with a family certainly helped him weather the harsh new realities facing artists like him, such as dwindling royalty revenues in the streaming age. And those new realities led him to come up with other entrepreneurial ideas about how to get people to buy his music directly or to just find out about him as an artist. So in 2016, Joe Pug decided to start his own weekly podcast, which he called The Working Songwriter.
RUSSO (cont.): In the decade since Pug has had well over a million downloads of the podcast, and he's interviewed over 300 of his contemporaries. The success of the podcast has helped him balance life as a dad and as a songwriter. But while Pug wears almost every hat that there is to wear in his small business, he says the reward has been the relationships he's curated with his fans and his followers.
PUG: When people come to shows, I've probably shaken hands with 50% of the people in the audience because I fulfill the online merchandise myself, I've probably personally sent a record to the address of 50% of the audience. That's just a much different thing than a band that's going to be playing arenas or something like that.
RUSSO: Joe Pug continues to prove that while living a life as a folk singer in modern day America, maybe much more of a grind than it was in 1960s. Balance can be found in a way where great music can be made, the mortgage can also be paid, and the road leads home to the ones who matter the most, more often than it doesn't. Joe Pug kicks off his 2026 tour in Easton, Maryland tonight at the Stoltz Listening Room inside the Avalon Theater. Tickets and more information can be found at avalonfoundation.org. I'm Bryan Russo for Delmarva Public Media.
