The band's first year was passed in an earnest, heartfelt daze of innocent music making... Anyone who came across this charming, rookie ensemble would have heard upwards of a dozen instruments rolling over one another in an earnest effort to bring Saporiti's youthful, southern love songs to life...

In early August (2005) the group began an excursion that stretched them over 10,000 miles in two weeks. Much more Lewis and Clark than a modern music tour, the tales from this journey alone deserve their own book. The long and short of it is, the band got a taste of what lay beyond. The great American landscape had inspired yet another set of its native artists.

When they returned to school in the fall, the group was now intensely focused on their music. Weekends were spent traveling between the towns of New Englad, pedaling their wares and honing their craft, often times with homework being completed between soundchecks and showtimes... Until their graduation in 2009, the band spent holidays, and sometimes schooldays, either touring the United States and Europe or retreating to any number of rural American towns - Farmington, ME, Wabasha, MN - to compose and record new music and retreat from the city life.

2008 began with the move to Tennessee and the construction of the band's recording studio on the Saporiti family estate on Sky Mountian. Funded by their English patron, this studio was built for the group to finally set about recording the dozens of songs that had been left uncommitted to tape in Boston.

During a spring retreat to Central Texas the band split apart. It was a foul affair, but details need not be discussed for it is really no one's business but the parties involved... Spirits were Titanic-low and without a drummer, recording halted. But even in circles, the band soldiered on, staying busy playing sessions, working through a set of traditional country music and auditioning drummers at a breakneck pace.

Deeply affected by the events transpired, Saporiti passed those sweltering days by hiking up to the peak of Sky Mountain and often times not returning at nightfall. When pressed, he won't speak about his time on the mountain, but his bandmates have revealed that it was during these days that he composed the songs which would make up their album Balletesque.

By October, the group had settled on a drummer named Logan Linning, a mountain man from the west who shared their rural upbringing and most importantly, could fit in with the band's already firmly established musical style. Recording finally began but not one the two albums which they had come to Nashville with. Instead, a ne batch of songs, dark and intense, would be the focus of the fall/winter sessions and become their proper debut album, the aforementioned Balletesque. Completed in January of 2009 and mixed fittingly enough in Central Texas, the album is a showcase for the massive depth of skill The Young Republic now possess as players and arrangers. Around Saporiti's finely composed songs, the band swells and lulls with vicious dynamics and violent urgency. The dual force of Bob Merkl's lead guitar and Kristin Weber's violin, excite the recordings with performances seldom pulled off in rock music - impressive runs and phrasings borrowed from their jazz and classical vocabularies. They play above the versatile rhythm section of Miller and Linning, who carry each track whether it be the churning chaos of "The Alchemist," the spooked jazz of "Sam Clemens," or the thundering waltz of "Tough Year". Of course, if a listener has kept up with the group since its inception, they would attest that perhaps the greatest strength of The Young Republic is its arrangements and orchestrations. Pushing the limits of their recording capabilities, the group appropriately and ambitiously scored Balletesque for anything they had the knowledge to write for. Horns and strings play integral roles anywhere they appear, often times tackling tricky passages and utilizing extended techniques that the rock n' roll medium has rarely, if ever seen - these more experimental flourishes championed by Violist / Sonic Scientist Nate Underkuffler.

The subject matter of Balletesque mines the depths of the American historical consciousness, past and present. Characters of salesmen, bootleggers, preachers, outlaws, western poets, actors, all search for theirs in settings of depression era New England, bloody, war-rattled Texas and mid-century Middle America. Trains, oil, blood, snake handlers, boats, loose women. America, black and white, red and blue. To dig beyond the fiction and folk yields personal insight Saporiti. Betrayal and loss are common threads and certainly reflect on the bandmates whose loss defined the previous year. His observances of an unstable country, most visibly through economy, and what it is to be a youth on such shaky ground, loom lyrically large. But perhaps the main theme of Balletesque is the realization and acceptance that you lose, you don't get it back and life goes on. In The Young Republic's case, their losses - bandmates, tours, sleep, time - have yielded a stronger unit that is hitting its stride. A band that is all too rare these days. A band of musicians. A band that can play.