Part I - The Gospel According to Joe: Meditations on Joe Pug’s Sketch of a Promised Departure.

Introduction

“And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know.” —Walker Percy

“As a modern person, I can’t believe in the resurrection. But I have to say, the psychological truth of Christianity…” —Joe Pug, in conversation with the author when the author availed himself of Joe Pug’s gracious practice of standing by his merch table to shake hands and chat after his shows and the author asked him about his interest in the novel Godric by Fredrick Buechner, a book about a medieval saint apparently alluded to in one of Joe Pug’s songs.

Joe Pug uttered some version of those words at the back of the Blue Door in Oklahoma City in the summer of what must’ve been 2016. As is his wont, he was standing by his merch table, shaking hands and chatting with fans. My friends and I were at the end of the line, so it was especially gracious for Pug to have more than a perfunctory conversation with us. In what I hope was not too obtuse a manner, I’d just pointed out that he seemed to have referenced Friedrich Nietzsche (“The Great Despiser”) and Frederick Buechner (“The Measure”), and then I’d asked him what he’d been reading lately. He gave me a wry look and said he wasn’t getting much time to read (and what man with a job and a family really does, we can ask). But Buechner’s novel Godric, he added, had been big for him. As a fan of the novel myself, I asked him why. A brief explanation followed, at the end of which he uttered the lines I’ve chosen as an epigraph. 

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I wasn’t recording the conversation. No Holy Ghost of Americana music has recalled his exact words to mind. But I can say in full confidence that the above sentence conveys the precise meaning of what he said. As a matter of fact, I think I do remember exactly what he said and how he said it. Instead of leaving off after “the psychological truth of Christianity,” he said “man,” and kind of shook his head or gave us a look, as if to say, “the psychological truth of Christianity is really compelling.” I asked him what he meant, and he mentioned the scene in the Gospels wherein Peter and Jesus walk on water. He likened the miracle to any feat, performance, or work successfully conducted, and Peter’s doubt and sinking to the effects of self-consciousness. 

I don’t know how anyone could disagree with that psychological insight. And as someone who does believe in the resurrection, I have no objection to Pug’s allegorical method of interpretation. To me, although scripture is more than literature or myth, it is not less, and the psychological truth of Christianity is indeed compelling. 

Until recently, I would have hesitated to quote that conversation. But in light of Joe Pug’s latest release, Sketch of a Promised Departure, it hardly seems like any betrayal of confidence or even all that illuminating of an insight. The new album blatantly explores the psychological truth of Christianity.

In this series, I aim to interrogate that truth in the form Pug gives it on his new album. While the musical composition itself represents a new apex in his catalog, I’ll mainly be interpreting the lyrics. Or trying to interpret the lyrics, I should say. The lyrical obscurity and suggestiveness is perhaps the biggest goad to my undertaking this. I can sympathize with Chris Link, who said of track one, "I haven't a clue what the song means, but it sounds deep as shit." And while it might seem odd to treat an Americana album like T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland… Okay, it is odd. But confronted with themes and motifs so rich, evocative, and elusive, I feel I can do no other. Besides, in addition to being a big Pug fan, I’m an English teacher.

In “How Good You Are,” he sings, “Everything you were meant for / What you were put on earth to do / Does not need you to do it / Someone else was born to do it too.” The lines are typical of Pug’s honesty, lack of sentimentality, his deftness with a punchline, and an occasional metaphysical pessimism. It seems a far cry from the allusion to Godric in “The Measure” from his 2015 LP Windfall: “All we’ve lost is nothing to what we’ve found”; but even in this redemption-attuned lyric, there lies an awareness of despair and tragedy. 

At least one review has noted that Sketch of a Promised Departure feels like a return to the spirit of Pug’s first release, Nation of Heat. Considering that Nation of Heat introduced a few of the motifs Pug perennially manifests in his work—the mission of the outlaw, the heavy burden of dreams, the cost of vocation, with a beleaguered honesty and a critique of bullshit—I tend to agree. Sketch feels like an apotheosis of these tropes. 

I'm pretty sure I tuned in for Joe Pug's first live streaming event. It was around 2015 or '16. I bought a ticket and logged in to whatever platform it was on (Pug's prescience, in trying live-streaming when virtually no one had dreamed of a pandemic, is remarkable). It was funny and, at the end of the day, genuinely great, but Pug has done a lot to refine the product into Sunday Songs. People weren't quite trolling him in the chat area, but watching him respond to some of the more out-of-pocket comments was hilarious. At the same time, I was by myself at my house watching a concert. And, yes, I'm pretty sure it was a Friday night.

Two things stand out: a) it was the first time I heard him play "None the Wiser," which still stands out; b) someone in the chat asked him about the significance of "April 7th, '65," which the butler in "How Good You Are" carves into a piano. Pug cited an important battle from the Vietnam War, and said that if he'd known about it when he was writing the song, he would've proven himself a very wise and learned songwriter. Then he said something I use to this day to emphasize the importance of form to my students. He said that sometimes he writes for meaning, but that he always writes for rhythm and meter. In other words, the date didn't really mean anything to him.

Well, fair enough. And not that Pug was hoisting the postmodern flag when he explained his process, but in light of such insight, we needn't take Archibald MacLeish literally when he says, "A poem should not mean / But be." ("Ars Poetica"). While there is perhaps something to be said for this and for Magritte's painting The Treachery of Images and its caption, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," their theory of meaning has some problems. Okay, words and objects have a palpable, physical existence. The thing comprised of a wooden bowl connected to a stem with an airway for tobacco smoke is not the same thing as the vocable indicated by the word "pipe." But can we really pretend the mysterious linking faculty in the human understanding that marries sign to signified doesn't exist? It seems the intellectual, social phenomenon indicated by the mysterious little word "is" does exist. Objects have names that people in a linguistic community know together. Poems do mean, even though they have physical, sensuous form. If the thing you smoke tobacco with isn't a "pipe," then why paint representational pictures with captions under our titled paintings and expect people to look at our paintings and read our captions and understand them? Magritte's and MacLeish's works are being playful, but if taken seriously, they enact contradictions of their own suggestions. If taken seriously, MacLeish's poem about poems not meaning hoists itself on its own petard.

Joe Pug, of course, wasn't espousing postmodern theories of art and language with his comment about "April 7th '65," and the assumed theory of language doesn't pose any problems. Like I said, I qoute him to my students all the time. According to his own testimony, he does sometimes write for meaning. I take his reticence when people ask him what his songs mean as both a magician's ethic of never revealing his secrets and as a poet's stubborn insistence that the reader do his own interpretation. Words are things, but they also mean other things.

It’s impossible for me not to see the direct engagement with the gospels on this album. I might be apt to overemphasize this engagement and to see strong connections when the actual relationship of sign to signified might be more tenuous—in other words, the album might be kind of a Rorschach test. But even if I’m a hammer taking everything for a nail, the lyrics fire the imagination and illuminate deep truths of the human experience—and perhaps of the divine experience. To me that’s what makes this a great work of art. The album does something like what Walker Percy says art does—it validates the human experience and tells people deep truths they already unconsciously know. (My understanding of language and meaning is heavily indebted to Percy, by the way: cf. The Message in the Bottle).

Pug has just about mastered the art of evoking much with little, of locating the Archimedes’ fulcrum of music and lyrics that moves the listener. The lyrics are spare, the songs short, and the lines are like prisms refracting light in any number of directions. Because of this precision, the meanings evoked by the words are available in a wide range. But it’s not as if the possibilities of interpretation are infinite. As I tell my students when we study poetry, interpretations aren’t singular, nor are they endless—for most poetry, there’s a range of valid interpretation. This approach differs from pure reader-response theory in which we are allowed to read in whatever we want, irrespective of the signposts of denotation, syntax, and structure. It’s also not a pre-death-of-the-author approach that seeks to discover the one single meaning an artist meant to convey. It might also be true that different works of art call for different modes of interpretation. The meanings of prose allegories are more limited, in a way, than that of an imagist poem. I’d argue that Pug’s album calls for a method somewhere in the middle of this continuum–between complete open-endedness and a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified. After all, on another album he sings, "I've come to say exactly what I mean / and I mean so many things."

If I understand what I’ve heard about Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, my method departs from the one she suggests. The poetry on Sketch is richer in meaning than I have time to unpack, but it nevertheless welcomes a few readings and indicates broadstroke themes and narratives–all of them related and consonant with one another. And to give the devil her due, it is entirely possible to deeply enjoy this album without really interpreting a single verse. The music and lyrics might, for many listeners, create immediately powerful impressions. The reason I’m doing this is that, for me, the challenge of interpretation is an extension of the immediate joy of hearing the tunes. Style and beauty by themselves can be their own justification, but I also believe in the harmonious marriage of form and content.

Throughout these pieces, I’ll offer interpretations based on the idea that various songs operate in different modes and that, unannounced, different speakers take possession of the first person pronouns. At times, the speaker is closely identified with Christ, at others (perhaps in the same song) with someone not unlike Joe Pug, and on a few occasions with a character not dissimilar from the narrator of a mythic novel–as in Faulkner, a kind of Homeric witness, a chorus-leader, or even like one of the eyewitness narrator’s of certain of the canonical gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. The speaker on these songs is also apt to eschew first person pronouns for the second person “you.”

On occasion it might seem like I’m committing the intentional fallacy–the mistake of supposing the correct interpretation of a work depends on knowledge of the writer’s meaning and mental state at the moment of composition. I’m actually not all that dogmatic about the prohibition against trying to find out what a writer meant, but I acknowledge the fallacy’s implied prohibition as a valid guideline and will mostly try to avoid committing it. On one hand, it’s interesting to hear artists talk about how they came to write certain pieces (cf. Paul McCartney and Paul Muldoon’s podcast, McCartney: A Life in Lyrics). On the other hand, I think it’s sensible to embrace the approach expressed by Nathanial Hawthorne when he said, “Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.” It’s not that words and images can’t form meaningful transmissions of ideas from one mind to another, but it’s also not the case that nothing valid or interesting happens in the audience’s act of interpretation. In short, I’m neither a postmodernist nor a literalist.

What I propose to do here is to synthesize my impressions of the album and to offer a song-by-song interpretation. My working theory is that arranged language and music, in the context of a culture, communicate intelligible themes. And along the way, I’ll offer some smaller, definite observations about specific stuff highlighted in the songs. By the end, I hope to uncover more or less what the album suggests about the artist, about our culture, and perhaps about Christ.

A (‘nother) caveat. I’m going to point out the parallels between the characters and events on this album and the canonical gospels. It could be the case that there are more direct references to non-canonical gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas. I haven’t read this gnostic text, but I’ve heard Pug somewhere (probably on The Working Songwriter) mention an affinity for it. In all likelihood, some fruitful meditation might center on the question of whether this album embodies (if I may) an ethos more gnostic than Christianity’s incarnationalism. I can’t promise I’ll get to that in this series, but the ending might suggest where Pug stands on the question of the bodily resurrection and, hence, the hypostatic union–Christ as God fully embodied in human flesh (Cf. John 1:14).

I’ll end my introduction with a guess as to what the story’s about. Even in today’s age of disembodied music listening on smart phones and streaming apps, one’s first impression of an album is likely to be its cover art. With Sketch, we get a youngish looking man with curly hair and a short beard standing with his body facing the horizon. His head is turned in profile and circled by a disc of light. The disc doubles as a sun and a halo. It’s a modern update of the long tradition of Christian iconography. At the top of the sun/halo float a small host of human figures. These figures seem to be ascending ahead of or waiting for the haloed young man. He appears to be wearing a baggy coat and a low-slung backpack. With no more context than the album title, he seems to be about to ascend to heaven behind a small host of other saints. Lyrics on the album will reinforce this interpretation, particularly the coda to “Treasury of Prayers”: “my hope will never end / that you found heaven quick from here in Baltimore, my friend.” It looks like the “promised departure” will be a passage from this earth to the afterlife.

No one but Pug could say exactly what he was thinking about while he was walking on this water, but I can tell you that, unlike St. Peter–he wasn’t looking at the waves.

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