These United States:
“Brilliantly captures the overwhelming joy of simply being alive.”- SPIN
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 five years These United States has played 800 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.
Mike Coykendall:
Portland, Oregon-based songwriter, performer and producer Mike Coykendall's new record, Chasing Away The Dots, is the latest in a long and winding musical journey that has taken him from the rural farmlands of Kansas to television and concert stages around the world. If integrity, experience and artistry still count for anything, this record will be his most well-received to date. Over the years, Coykendall has been critically acclaimed as a musician, engineer and producer for his work with well-known artists such as M. Ward, She & Him, Blitzen Trapper, Bright Eyes, the Old Joe Clarks, Tin Hat, Sallie Ford, Richmond Fontaine and Jolie Holland, to name but a few.
Coykendall's own compositions are wildly rich and varied, with and unpretentious and organically unpredictable quality, immediately drawing the listener in, then continuing to reward over repeated listens. On Chasing Away The Dots, Coykendall is joined by a star-studded cast of special guests, including M. Ward, Zooey Deschanel, Ben Gibbard, Eric Earley (Blitzen Trapper), Rob Burger (Tin Hat, Iron & Wine), Scott McPherson (Eliott Smith, Beck), and a long list from Portland's rich musical community.
The sounds contained within the grooves of Chasing Away The Dots range from earnest to irreverent, wistful to scorching, direct to oblique, always with an underpinning of subtle psychedelia. The mood lifts and falls while Coykendall's distinctly American voice casually narrates the whole affair. Lyrically, the album takes on such universal subjects as loss, love, alienation, separation, longing, aging, infatuation, kindness, and other human conditions. These themes emerge, filtered through the eyes and ears of someone who has bee around long enough to live through it, and return, several times over--a man who knows that the sun will rise, and so will the moon.
Coykendall will be touring nationally and internationally in support of the record beginning in September. The record is being released both in CD format, and as a special limited-edition vinyl package, The vinyl edition will include, as a bonus, an exclusive copy (on CD) of the album in an expanded double record edition featuring 12 extra tracks. A Daytrotter session was recorded, and has recently been posted, highlighting four of the tracks from the new record (as performed by Coykendall with help from M. Ward, Chris Scruggs, Scott McPherson, and Carlos Forster).
Paleo (according to Wikipedia):
Paleo, aka David Strackany, is an American singer of folk music who is notable for writing a song every day for 365 days using a "half-size children's guitar" while living out of his car and being essentially homeless. He plays acoustic guitar and sings and in 2011 began touring the United States. He has a recording arrangement with an indie music label named Partisan Records.
