This year marks the 20th anniversary of My Morning Jacket’s debut album, The Tennessee Fire. To celebrate, the band is releasing a deluxe reissue, and today they’ve shared a previously unreleased track called “John Dyes Her Hair Read.”
The reissue includes the original 16-song Tennessee Fire LP and a bonus disc featuring 13 unreleased songs. “This is one of the first song-poems I ever wrote- I always liked the idea of a song being this little picture or puzzle, and not necessarily having to ‘mean’ something or be about some big story or have tons of linear lyrics, but more just painting a weird little scene,” frontman Jim James explains in a statement.
“I have always tried to make my music gender-neutral when it comes to love or romance, for the most part, so that a person of any gender could experience a song and not feel excluded if I was using ‘he’s’ or ‘she’s’ or whatever and this is an early experiment with that, of a person named John, which is traditionally a ‘male’ name, who is dying her hair red and sitting in the shower till it all turns back brown- and maybe one would think- ‘well why did she ever even dye her hair red in the first place?'”
Listen to “John Dyes Her Hair Red” below!
The Tennessee Fire: Deluxe Edition drops on August 2nd.