The Head and the Heart

Like many artists before him, Cory Chisel first connected with the power of song – and the spellbinding possibilities of live performance – through the music he heard in church. The gospel’s rich vernacular of loss and redemption also informed his innate poetic sense and lyrical range. “For most of my life,” he says, “my dad was a Baptist minister, so I learned a lot about being a showman, and I learned a lot about music. Many of the hymns from church still are the most beautiful songs I know. I'm thankful for growing up where stories and the pursuit of happiness were on everybody's mind. I think I’m still trying to achieve the same euphoria I felt at a very young age, when I would be completely taken over by these rhythms and these sounds and these stories.”

These United States surrender themselves to unbridled rock and roll exuberance: ringing guitars, thundering drums, desperate yearning bordering on hope. By turns larger-than-life and disarmingly intimate, this is 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.) And These United States 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.

Over the last three years These United States has played 600 shows, released four albums and gained the support of NPR's All Things Considered, World Cafe, and Mountain Stage, Spin, Paste, Filter, NY Times, Village Voice, Brooklyn Vegan, JamBase, The Onion, Daytrotter, My Old Kentucky Blog, KEXP, KCRW, WXPN, and WFUV. Festival highlights include: Lollapalooza, High Sierra, Pickathon, Glastonbury, Mt. Jam, XPoNential, Joshua Tree, Celebrate Brooklyn, and Forecastle.