These United States Earn Their Name

There’s a grand—or not so grand, depending on your tastes—tradition of bands naming themselves after their place of origin. Alabama, Kansas, Boston and many other proud sons have made a point to state their allegiance up front and center.

Add These United States to that esteemed list. While using the name of an entire country may not sound as specific as, say, Chicago, the broad scope fits perfectly for this five-piece band that specializes in a mélange of lo-fi indie-, alt-country and straightforward rock. Lead singer and songwriter Jesse Elliot hails from Washington, D.C., but since his band members—Justin Craig (guitar), Collin Kellog (bass), Robby Cosenza (drums) and the regionally in-demand Tom Hnatow (pedal steel)—hail from assorted areas, it’s understandable that this act considers itself a product of a nation and not merely one specific, smaller municipality.

Although, hey, if you’re gonna name your band after the whole country, you might as well do so from the capital, right?

Also, it helps that the band regularly tours the entire country, having crisscrossed the U.S. for the better part of the last four years. As a result, Elliot says he only makes it back to his hometown “one week out of every couple of months.”

“We don’t pretend to have huge fan bases anywhere,” he says. “But we’ve done enough loops of the country in the last three or four years here lately that we’ve begun to collect something like a snowball rolling downhill, or whatever the analogy is. Constant touring is the only real secret, and that’s not much of a secret, really. It just happens to be something we’re real good at.”

Touring at such a relentless rate has taken a toll on more than just the band members’ living situations or definitions of where home truly is. The group’s method of transportation, their beloved US Heyoka, a van purchased from the Lion’s Club of Fairfax, Virginia, recently fell to its demise, dying “a slow and painful death,” Elliot says.

Along with plugging in pretty much anywhere that will let them, the band, which played plenty at this year’s SXSW in Austin, has found that new locales will often reveal some unpleasant surprises—like, well, not being able to plug in at all. At a recent gig, Elliot explains, “no one knew how to work the P.A., so we basically just got on the floor with everyone and played acoustically as we wandered through the crowd. It’s actually more exciting when there’s no infrastructure, no lights, no stage, no P.A. All of a sudden, you’re just part of a big group of people.”

While the band in its current incarnation hasn’t been together for the entirety of TUS’ lifespan, Elliot says that, thanks to this lineup, the songs he has written for this summer’s follow-up to 2009’s excellent Everything Touches Everything have “a lot of style-hopping, but this will be the most cohesive-sounding album, since we have put so much time into arranging the songs together as a band.”

Given the band’s prolific recent past, it’s no surprise when Elliot confirms that, after the band’s fourth album comes out in July, the fifth record will be “coming soon after that.”

For now, though, the band’s focus is on the road. But having long since earned their status as road warriors, the group endures the rigors of the highway in a relatively business-like manner. Elliot and his mates stay busy with much of the operational concerns for the band—including knowing where to find a new bass string in a small town when they are unexpectedly out of such a necessity.

Such trivialities, Elliot explains, takes up “three-fourths of our lives. That does change at some level, we’re just not at that level yet.”

Not yet, at least.

But, for now, if nothing else, These United States’ members sure are proving themselves deserving of calling the whole country their home.