“A More Perfect Union” by Titus Andronicus

"A More Perfect Union" kicks off The Monitor, the second album from New Jersey punks Titus Andronicus, released in March 2010, and it doesn't do anything small. It runs 7 minutes and 10 seconds and is framed by voices from American history: it opens on a recording of Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum address and closes on a spoken passage from William Lloyd Garrison's article in the very first issue of The Liberator, from 1831. Patrick Stickles wrote the words and the music.

The band premiered the video on their MySpace page on March 29, 2010, three weeks after the album landed. Claire Carré shot it as an outdoor performance in the snow, and at 3 minutes and 35 seconds it's precisely half the song's length, stopping after the Garrison reading and leaving off what Tom Breihan called "the raging second half".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.