The Hurt Locker, Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Christopher Waltz, Mo’Nique.
There, I just freed up your Sunday night. Wanna go see some excellent music instead?
Actually, if Bridges gets any Oscar love, it bodes well for the status of the guitar-toting troubadour in America’s cultural mythology—and, perhaps, for the prospects of Joe Pug and Justin Townes Earle. [...]

Friday

Educated Consumers. Strathmore. $10 in advance, $12 at door.

Big Bang TV, Bridges and Powerlines, The Jet Age. The Red & The Black. $8. 21+.

Taylor Carson, Peter Mulvey. IOTA Club & Cafe. $12.

Rogue Wave, Avi Buffalo. 9:30 Club. $15.

Sondre Lerche, JBM. Rock and Roll Hotel. $20.

Stacy Brooks. Bangbok Blues. Call for price.

Jon Carroll. Wolf Trap. $22.

Bellman [...]

While the name "pug" generally inspires images of excitable canines, Joe Pug's second album Messenger is of a decidedly more melancholy nature. His 2007 debut EP, Nation of Heat, was a tribute to the trials of quarter-life-crisis sufferers full of fierce guitar strums and harmonica riffs. Though not a total miss, Pug's second album lacks [...]

I got some flack from a friend the other week when I all but anointed local boy Joe Pug the savior of folk music. His counterargument—aside from my insinuation being broad to the point of inanity—was a Swedish rambler by the name of Kristian Matsson, otherwise known as The Tallest Man on Earth. Matsson opened [...]

I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to say that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind, to reach forward and behind
For the more I seek, the more I’m sought
These lyrics, from Joe Pug’s “Hymn 101,” might as well be the tagline for Pug’s current year-long tour, which has taken [...]

The National, in Richmond, is a decorous little theater with a semiformal air. But on Tuesday night, when Steve Earle played a set of mostly Townes Van Zandt covers from his new tribute album, peppered with anecdotes from his 25-year friendship with its eponymous hero, the venue assumed the close familiarity of a living room. [...]

Social commentary, especially in music, is a tricky act: too blunt, audience rolls its eyes; too fine, audience scratches its head. "Whitman once explained that poetry's not supposed to confuse people," Joe Pug–local boy and folk icon-in-waiting–said in an interview last summer. At the same time, musicians that merely trot out talking points or shout [...]