Joe sings better: far, brilliantly better, with his own style that is deceptively simple and frighteningly vulnerable. What this guy does -- seemingly without forethought -- with an itty bitty grace note is intoxicating.

Joe's lyrics are rich enough to give you food for thought until lines like, "It ain't rare to hear the streetlights call themselves Stars" are welling up in your mouth while you're in the grocery store check-out line. And while he says words shouldn't confuse people, he doesn't shy away from speaking the serious complexities of being human, being American, being young -- even though the majority of the population wouldn't "get" most of it if they accidentally landed face first into a bucket of it. Judging by his work, Joe is smart enough to know that. He writes it anyway.

Joe is followed around by a crescendo of a mob that uses certain words over and over. One is "Intimate." It's rare to watch someone perform in a way that feels like he's completely alone exploring his innermost trials of the soul, while also repeatedly reaching out into the audience completely open, raw, like he's giving all of that moment to you for safe-keeping.

Personally I think it's already his time to be the icon of a genre. Not really being into folk myself, I'm not sure what label works best.

Back in the day, my mom owned every Dylan and Baez album, alongside half of what came out of Motown -- not that we were some kind of rare Black working class folk music household, but because those artists expressed a slice of an era our parents didn't dare leave for the newspapers or our Polaroid to save for us. And I don't know what I'd call THIS era either. But Joe Pug is no throwback -- he's one of the voices of this time that will be, and truly needs to be, remembered. Not so he can save the Folk genre, but because he's showing us some tools for saving ourselves.