The Tennessee Fire

My Morning Jacket opened its five-show run at New York’s Terminal 5 with a complete rendition of its 1999 debut album The Tennessee Fire. The quintet ran through each of the album’s tracks in sequential order, including songs that the band had never performed live like “If All Else Fails.” Founding My Morning Jacket guitarist Johnny Quaid—who left the band in 2004—also sat in for a handful of songs during the performance, and My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James alternately described the show as a “a psychedelic experience,” “surreal” and “a reflecting pool.

While the band has toyed with The Tennessee Fire songs like “Nashville To Kentucky” and “Butch Cassidy” at recent shows, My Morning Jacket had not performed numbers like “It’s About Twilight Now” and “Picture of You” in over four years. With the exception of a 2007 benefit performance that found the members of My Morning Jacket performing with different musicians, the group had also not played “Old September Blues” in almost a decade.

The group returned for a seven-song encore that featured several covers and b-sides James and company recorded for its various EPs around the time of The Tennessee Fire. The mini-set opened with “I Just Wanted To Say” from the group’s holiday EP Does Christmas Fiasco Style and included covers of Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” Erykah Badu’s “Tyrone” (which the band played with the singer in 2008), The Great Society’s “White Rabbits” and Rod Stewart’s “Hot Legs.”

“I’m not even sure why we’ve stayed away from them,” bassist Two-Tone Tommy told Relix while discussing the songs the band retired. “It’s probably because we played those songs so much in the first year we started that we just stopped playing them once new material was produced. But I’m looking forward to bringing those songs back. Songs like ‘Nashville to Kentucky’ we’ve done recently with Carl Broemel doing a sax solo and ‘They Ran’ we did a couple times and had this big kind of loungy ending.”

My Morning Jacket will perform At Dawn in its entirety tonight. Below is a look at last night’s setlist.

1. Heartbreakin Man
2. They Ran
3. The Bear
4. Nashville To Kentucky
5. Old September Blues
6. If All Else Fails (live debut)
7. It’s About Twilight Now (last played 2006)
8. Evelyn Is Not Real
9. War Begun
10. Picture Of You (last played 2006)
11. I Will Be There When You Die
12. The Dark
13. By My Car
14. Butch Cassidy
15. I Think I’m Going To Hell

E:

16. I Just Wanted To Say (Does Christmas Fiasco Style)
17. Rocket Man (Elton John, last played 2001)
18. Weeks Go By Like Days (last played 2000)
19. Tyrone (Erykah Badu)
20. White Rabbit (The Great Society)
21. Hot Legs (Rod Stewart, last played 2000)
22. Lil Billy (last played 2002)