Chicago-based songwriter Joe Pug returns to town to play the Melting Point tonight. Flagpole recently caught up with the folkie for a quick chat.

Flagpole: In the early part of your career, you sent CDs by mail to anyone that requested them. Do you think you’re reaping the benefits from that now or is it hard to measure?

Joe Pug: Well, I think both. That’s how we got our foot in the door. That’s how we got our original kernel of an audience. But, how much that has had an effect down the years? That’s impossible to measure. You just have to throw a bunch of shit at the wall and hope that something sticks.

You’re playing the Melting Point for the second time in a year. Is there as much effort in building relationships with particular venues than with a crowd in a town or city?

Oh, yes. That’s the whole idea. I don’t want to get too inside-baseball here, but when you come to a town, it’s a promoter that brings you to town. Sometimes those promoters are in-house promoters and sometimes they are outside promoters… The corner [of the music industry] that I inhabit is a small ecosystem. And when you have a small ecosystem, you want to make sure everyone is fed.

You mentioned a while ago that you’ve noticed how locations across America have lost their character and they all seem to blend together. Has your view on that changed with touring over the past few years?

Well, it’s changed in the sense that I’ve realized that you can seek out authenticity in different towns. It just takes effort on your part. You can’t be lazy. You get out of a town as much you put into it, I suppose. If you don’t put much in, all you’ll see is the Steak and Shake and the Hampton Inn. But if you put a little time and effort in, you will find Penny’s Diner and the Lincoln Motel.

What have you learned from touring over the past few years compared to what you knew when you first started out?

Just like any other job, you are constantly learning—or you should be constantly learning. Both with my writing and with what I see as my day job, which is basically a truck driver with touring. I try to come to all of it with a heart of a student and the heart of someone who doesn’t know the half of what’s going on. When you come to it with that sort of mindset, you tend to learn a lot. For me, I guess the main thing I’ve learned is that my tour is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. To be able to take it easy and to be able to be consistent in a lot of ways, is important to me.

It’s been a few years since your last studio release. Is there anything on the way as far as new studio material that is coming soon?

We’re recording a new album in March. Most of it is written at this point. We’re sprinking the new songs in the sets that we’re playing live. We’re very hard at work with it. I am going to into the studio with my live band. It should be out sometime over the spring or the fall.

Joe Pug plays the Melting Point tonight, Thursday, Feb. 6. We've got a pair of tickets to give away. To win, tell us in the comments below why YOU deserve to go for free. We'll choose a winner at 5 p.m.