Playback Field Recordings: These United States

Vagabond, rabble-rousing alt-country five piece These United States write songs that will burn your barn down. Buy insurance.

For a band split between two cities more than 500 miles apart, These United States have managed to come together to create an incredible amount of music in the past two years. In fact, they'd give practically anyone a run for their money, geography be damned. With more than half the band's five members living in Lexington, KY and the other two calling Washington, D.C. home, These United States managed to come together to release three full-length records in 18 months.

Everything Touches Everything, their most recent effort, was released this September via United Interests, and throwing it on the stereo is like uncorking a bottle of rock and roll champagne, it pops and fizzes with spirited, old-time, hootenanny energy, intoxicates with thoughtful Americana-influences and spills over with exuberance and joy.

And all of this is not to mention the touring. The brand of all-out, barn burning alt-country These United States makes needs to be played live, so frontman Jesse Elliot leads his bandmates, drummer Robby Cosenza, guitarists J. Tom Hnatow and Justin Craig, and bassist Colin Kellogg, on endless jaunts from city to city. In 2009 alone the band trekked to more than 200 shows.

On the last night of a 30-day tour that took them from the San Diego sunshine to the snowy mountains of Montana and included a tornado encounter, two border crossings and a lot of shows, These United States joined us upstairs in the lounge at Pianos on New York's Lower East Side to play a few songs for Playback Editor-in-Chief Erik Philbrook and Deputy Editor Lavinia Jones Wright and to talk about how they made 'em.