Everything Touches Everything

Everything Touches Everything (Released 9/1/09)

“Welcome to today. From the opening cry of empty-handed liberty to the gleaming, gliding farewell that sends us to blessed slumbers, this is a revolutionary soundtrack built for car stereos and stocking-footed bedroom dancing. Launching with a trio of sing-along anthems for tramps like us, These United States proffer a lean, hungry, lustily inviting manifesto for the best parts of humanism. We are no longer prisoners of the past, and the future is ours to make or break. Roll up your sleeves, grab a tambourine and a shovel and join the revival.”

– Dennis Cook, JAMBASE
(excerpt from liner notes)

With their third full length release in 18 months, These United States surrender themselves to unbridled rock and roll exuberance: ringing guitars, thundering drums, desperate yearning bordering on hope. Everything Touches Everything came together the week of January 20th, 2009, as 4 million new friends descended on the city of Washington, DC (one of two places, with Lexington, KY, the band calls home). Laughter, belief, chaos, history, frigid cold wild mercury winter morning sunshine – it was a good place to be making music.

By turns larger-than-life and disarmingly intimate, this is 42 minutes of folk in the truest sense – a record of the moment, of the cultural and emotional forces that animate everyday existence somewhere down below the headlines. (But never apart from them. Bandleader Jesse Elliott had two different albums in mind; he let the November election decide which one the group would record.) And These United States — Elliott, Robby Cosenza, J. Tom Hnatow, Justin Craig, and Colin Kellogg — play it the way folk was meant to be played: hard, fast, big, slow, long, loud, loose, at last unburdened. They play like they mean it. Like there’s never been a better time to be alive.

Track listing (click track title for lyrics):

1. I Want You to Keep Everything *  MP3
2. Will It Ever
3. Everything Touches Everything *  MP3
4. Night & the Revolution
5. The Secret Door
6. Conquest & Consequence
7. I’m Gonna Assemble a City
8. Good Bones
9. The Important Thing
10. End
11. Good Night Wish