Released as a 5-record boxed set (later reissued on four CDs), the album is a recording of a performance of Anderson's piece United States at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City in February 1983.

Segments ranged from humorous, such as "Yankee See," which gently chided Anderson's record label, Warner Bros. Records, for signing her in the first place, to the apocalyptic anthem "O Superman," which had been an unexpected Top 10 hit for Anderson on the UK music charts in 1981.

The live album set is a truncated rendering of the performance, omitting many segments that were solely of a visual nature.

[5] Anderson later performed a modified arrangement of the song in her 1986 concert film Home of the Brave.

Although Anderson has since created numerous other major performance pieces (i.e. Moby-Dick, Stories from the Nerve Bible, Happiness, The End of the Moon), United States Live remains, to date, the only serious attempt at producing anything approaching a full-length recording of any of these performances, although her previous album Big Science and her segment of the compilation You're the Guy I Want to Share My Money With consisted of studio-recorded excerpts from United States.