The pervading image I get from this album is of a man travelling down a road without knowing where he is bound.
This doesn't necessarily mean that Joe Pug has no direction, it's simply that he is suspicious of the notion that life can be likened to a journey towards a clearly defined destination.
In an interview with Folk Alley, he commented: "You can't change your lot but you can change how you experience it".
The theme of the record is resilience with an implicit subtext that there's little to gain from sweating the small stuff. This philosophy is best encapsulated in If It Still Can't Be Found, the closing track. Here, Pug expresses a confidence that he will eventually find the right road although the chorus counsels patience : "If it's not around this corner, it's around the next".
Within this context it is significant that the album's epigram should be "All we've lost is nothing to what we've found", a line from The Measure quoted from Frederic Buechner's novel Godric, a fictionalised story of a medieval saint.
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Pug's has stated that his aim with this record is to keep things simple, "to capture the music just the way we play it".
I criticised his 2008 EP Nation Of Heat for being too impersonal but here he brings a more individual character to the material.
The ten songs are all about keeping the faith, standing your ground, developing a thicker skin and generally sticking it out for the long haul.
His name may sound like that of a cartoon character but Texan singer-songwriter Joe Pug is an artist who deserves to be taken seriously.
Joe Pug's website
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