The way certain people come into ours lives leaves the most indelible stamp on our minds and forbids us to think of those specific ones in any different light than the one we remember as the first light. Jesse Elliott, through no extraordinary effort made such an entrance and impression. He’s lively and, really, just the embodiment of living and breathing. He’s perpetually keyed up, like a white and bearded hype man – getting our attentions and making us believe that the flurry of energy is justified. His smile is the length of a par-5 and it’s forever tiered across his face – the first thing you run into when you come face-to-face with These United States. The states and senses and feelings and emotions that are combined to make Elliott are too numerous to delineate, but that they all exist concurrently in the same flesh, in unrelenting quantities, is a rarity. He talks about cats and kids and he doesn’t mean cats and kids – he talks like a bluesman imported from the 1930s and at times he looks like Kris Kristopherson hitchhiking down Route 66, with his whole life in his rucksack. He made all of these impressions within an instant of walking in our door and ascending our staircases. He’d written us an e-mail (and you should see these beautiful pieces of correspondence – writings that are centaurs of Lester Bangs and Jack Kerouac and random capital letters as if the word “heart” deserves a Big H as the Big G gets the Big G) three days before he and our now dear friend Paleo were going to be passing through the area and he inquired about the ability to record with us. It took half a minute of listening to the songs on his MySpace page to know that we needed to say yes, pull back our secured gates and let the man come in to work his business. He played mostly by himself, not letting on that he’s got a crack squad of bandmates back home in Washington D.C. who help to give these songs (written by Elliott and Paleo, who sat in for some minimal percussion during the session) the kind of legs that don’t just clutch your undivided attention, but they envelope you, making you feel like a soil piled onto soil, so naturally one with everything around you. It’s a feeling that doesn’t come from many records or out of very many people. This session is an appetizer, sneak previews to the full-on versions of these tunes, which will – if the stars align instead of cross – be available soon in stores everywhere. It is, without being at all overly enthusiastic, one of the best records you will hear this year and it will make you feel completely human. You’ll feel your fingernails grow. You’ll start to understand what all of your facial muscles do when they’re not smiling or frowning. You’ll taste that blood as it finds all of your many cracks and detours. – Sean Moeller

First song
First Sight (These United States) [2.61MB] [2230 downloads]


– original version appears on the forthcoming The Forest and the Garden
If ever the high school prom becomes instead a time when adolescents yearn for the babbledy-gook that goes on in hearts rather than the bompity-crack that goes down in hips, well, we’ll be ready and waiting there, with a Genesis Story Anthem for them kids. Blah blah blah, just like all the rest, just trying in vain to crack through at something indescribable, but the tasty zen nougat goodness existing exactly in that tension — happily, we shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows!

Second song
Already Got a Girl Who Calls Me That (These United States) [3.93MB] [2182 downloads]


– unreleased
One of the more straightforward TheseUS songs ever writ. There’s a girl. Her boots are bedazzling. But it’s not just boots, see? It’s something more. Something like love. Something that’s got in the way of by something else. Namely, a girl who’s already bedazzled. And so it goes, ever onward in a socially vicious and biological virtuous cycle. Penned in a club, drunker than a skunk of course, and riding the crest of a wave of infinite possibility.

Third song
So High So Low So Wide So Long (These United States) [3.33MB] [2111 downloads]


– original version appears on the forthcoming The Forest and the Garden
The classic existential drama – how to make meaning in a meaningless world. The answer of course is to throw yourself to the lions, mix up your metaphors til y’can’t see straight no more, and start walking from there. The tune’s seen many an incarnation over the last couple years — can’t even remember which one it was we recorded on that overcast day in Rock Island. But I guess that’s part of the point. The Forest and the Garden, this album we’ll hopefully be putting out any day now, thought for a while about calling it Indisputable Science. Thanking the aesthetic gods now that Paleo talked me down off that ledge.

Fourth song
What Do You Want With My Heart (These United States) [2.55MB] [2130 downloads]


– original version appears on the forthcoming The Forest and the Garden
Hotdamnitall, we did something of a love set here, no? Seems strange — what must’ve going back to the M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-s-s High Country been doing to our Hearts, this Daytrotter voyage so autumn months ago? Another one here what’ll sound right different when finally out roaming around a primitive beast free in its Forest and Garden, can’t wait to hear what version we must’ve put out there without harmonica or vibraphone. If I remembered anything more useful in Origin terms, I swear to you I’d put it all out there on the line. But I s’pose that’s why we write these songs, to some extent: the meat of existence they’re carved outta decays too-quick in time’s brine, eh?

Tour dates
March 22 – San Francisco – Hotel Utah
March 23 – Portland, Oregon – The Funky Church
March 24 – Seattle – The Comet
March 25 – Whitefish, Montana – The Palace
March 26 – Whitefish, Montana – SnowGhost Session
March 27 – St. Paul, Minn. – Big V’s
March 28 – Iowa City, Iowa – The Yacht Club
March 29 – DeKalb, Ill. – The Dining Room
March 30 – Chicago – The Hideout
March 31 – Kalamazoo, Mich. – Kraftbrau Brewery
April 1 – Bloomington, Ind. – Art Hospital
April 2 – Newport, Ky. – Southgate House
April 3 – Columbus, Ohio – The Distillery
April 4 – Cleveland, Ohio – Pat’s in the Flats
April 5 – Jamestown, New York – Mojo’s
April 6 – Rochester, New York – A/V Space
April 7 – Syracuse, New York – Spark Contemporary Art Space
April 8 — Burlington, Vermont – Second Floor
April 9 – Portsmouth, New Hampshire – The Red Door
April 10 – Portland, Maine – Space
April 11 – Boston, Massachusetts – O’Brien’s
April 12 – Providence, R.I. – The Ship
April 13 – Philadelphia, PA – TBA
April 14 – New York, New York – Cake Shop
April 15 – Washington, D.C. – Warehouse Next Door (Paleo’s end of the Song Diary show)