Hymn 101 - Joe Pug

Joe Pug is the real deal.  I believe he is.  I believe he is one of those chosen storytellers, the ones who have the power to change a generation, because they're so full of words that it just takes one - one album, one song, one word that can ignite a people, ignite them like a flare in the thick of a dry forest of brush that is the youth, the youth that is starved for honesty, starved for stories, starved for something that they can hold on to, starved for something to coalesce their attention, something that has substance.

'Hymn 101' is that flare.  It works like a flare, starts from a low place, a base, a place of identification, a place that everyone knows, an open road if you will.  And it rises.  Oh, does it rise.  The strum is steady like a rickshaw, but the lyrics progress, unfold.

What makes Pug resonate is because he realizes, he isn't one of a kind, he doesn't see himself as an ace of spades, he's not going to change the face of music.  He realizes that it is his time, his time in a long list of times, a heritage of musicians, but more a heritage of folk folk - the storytellers who don't write anything down but have keen memories and oral tradition.  Yet he will make his time last, because what he says in his time has staying power.

He says:

'I've come to reach out blind,
To reach forward and behind,
For the more I seek the more I'm sought'

It's painful how much we fail to remember that to reach forward, you must always reach behind.  History repeats itself.  It is cyclical, it's predictable in many ways, for better or for worse or for both.  This is how Pug's music is.  His words are original, but they exist in a community of influence, throw a dart between Dylan and Twain and Moses and you can find similarities, spheres of influence that overlap on a grid at points A-Z to the nth power, and each of those intersections is a point in time of a storyteller, and that point in time is their time.  Right now is Joe Pug's time and he knows it.

The song is strewn with the narrator's voice of explanation, his voice that gives reasons for his arrival and for his journey.  The line that stands out to me is:
'I've come to test the timber of my heart'
That is what this song comes down to, that could be what it means, it means that he's got something inside of him, and it's either rotting or it's growing and he means to found out which.  Perhaps the former led to the latter, which spurred his feet on this journey, this spiritual journey of foundation, of seeking.

And it all comes down to the end, a fitting end.

And you've come to know me stubborn as a butcher,
And you've come to know me thankless as a guest,
But 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?

He comes to the end of the road, perhaps a changed man.  Perhaps the road has shaped his rotten wooden heart and has rooted itself in substance, in good earth, so that now it means to grow, to produce.  Perhaps he is almost unrecognizable now, because how can there possibly be a recognition between shadow and light?  How can the night ever linger long enough to see the dawn?

And yes there God waits at the end, with his revealing awful grace.  His painful grace, his awestruck eyes-wide grace, his reverential penitent grace that strips away everything and shows the essence of a person, an essence that appears to be filthy - jacket and vest covered in dirt-muck and sweat-spit, but when stripped away, it shows to be concealing something much more beautiful, something much more vibrant - you.  And man, is that worth singing about.