Returning to the newly renovated Dillon Amphitheatre for the second and final night, String Cheese Incident continued their seven-show run across their home state of Colorado on Wednesday night. The band’s fanbase has been undoubtedly excited about this extended home-state throwdown, with Cheese coming off of standout performances at Telluride’s RIDE Festival over the weekend and a fiery opening night in Dillon on Tuesday. Rising to the occasion, String Cheese Incident maintained their momentum for their Wednesday night showing, offering a celebratory, jam-heavy performance ahead of the band’s highly anticipated three-night run at Morrison, Colorado’s iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

Starting things off with “Sometimes A River”, a classic track off 2005’s One Step Closer, the group set the tone for the evening with the jubilant tune. Notably, String Cheese Incident is known for their diverse sound, particularly in recent years as they fused a wide range of genres into their characteristic bluegrass-rooted jams. However, as with the night prior, the band tended to focus on giving the proper treatment to a number of older tunes from their expansive catalog—a delight for the band’s many old-school fans in attendance that have followed Cheese since their earliest days in Crested Butte and Telluride.

However, the highlights of the first set came in the band’s jamming across songs, with the band expertly weaving through older fan-favorite “Best Feeling” and a beloved cover of Bob Marley’s “Exodus” before closing off the well-jammed combination with a psychedelic take on “BollyMunster”. Yet another old-school tune followed, an outstanding rendition of “Barstool”, which stood alone before SCI again kicked it into high gear with a set-closing combo of “Water”, “Sand Dollar”, and a high-octane “Texas”.

While the majority of the first set saw the band leaning into their classic catalog, embracing and triumphantly offering the songs that earned them so many fans in the first place, String Cheese Incident shifted gears at the start of set two, debuting a brand-new tune written by drummer Michael Travis called “Illegal”. After a standalone first-time run through of the group’s brand-new track to open set two, again the group flexed their improvisational muscles, using the classic song “Climb” as a launching pad into a cover of Traffic’s “Glad”. From there, with Kyle Hollingsworth leading the way, the keyboardist’s fiery solos built the jam up before landing in the feel-good crowd-pleaser “Outside and Inside”.

A relatively newer song, “Falling Through The Cracks”, came next, before the band offered up a take on yet another song with a long-standing history, “Sirens”. Closing out the show, the band amped up the energy, again highlighting the group’s immense improvisational abilities during the set-ending one-two hit of “Rhythm Of The Road” into “Shine”. For their encore, the band looked to the Dillon Amphitheatre’s gorgeous surroundings, appropriately performing a triumphant rendition of “High On A Mountain Top” for the audience gathered at the venue in the Rocky Mountain town.

Below, you can view an extensive gallery of photos from The String Cheese Incident’s final night at Dillon Amphitheater in 2018, courtesy of photographer John Verwey.

Setlist: The String Cheese Incident | Dillon Amphitheater | Dillon, CO | 7/18/2018

Set One: Sometimes a River, Best Feeling > Exodus > Best Feeling > BollyMunster, Barstool, Water > Sand Dollar > Texas

Set Two: Illegal*, Climb > Glad > Outside and Inside, Falling Through The Cracks, Sirens, Rhythm Of The Road > Shine

Encore: High On A Mountain Top

* = FTP (new Travis song)