It’s June 19 inside Madison Square Garden, six days after the first New York Knicks NBA triumph since 1973, two weeks before the wedding of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, and 35 minutes into Goose’s soundcheck at the iconic venue. The band is playing
the first of two dates later that night, and their practice run goes for at least an hour. You see, bands that play four-hour-long, two-set shows do long-ass soundchecks.
Goose hail from Wilton, Connecticut, a woodsy, affluent town about 90 minutes from New York City. Seeing as the band and their organization live and create in the area, they are part of the New York Metropolitan area and thus citizens in good standing of Knicks Nation. The members of Goose — singer/guitarist/frontman Rick Mitarotonda, secondary singer/guitarist/keysman Peter Anspach, bassist Trevor Weekz, and drummer Cotter Ellis — sat courtside this past April as the Knicks faced the Chicago Bulls; some in the entourage wear orange and blue jerseys and make easy conversation with MSG staffers, who are clearly still walking on air.
The MSG organization sees a future with the band: an LED display at the venue’s third tier reads “WELCOME BACK TO MSG, GOOSE,” and clips from the finals are shown before tonight’s proceedings — surely this is the first time the Knicks theme song “Go New York Go New York Go” has been played at a jam band show.
“I”m generally not in tune with sports,” says Mitarotonda, the band’s primary creative wellspring, “but this time is maybe the first ever that I had been this into a big sports event. I’d gone to Knicks games with my dad, who had been a basketball player, so this is a special time.”
The other dominant color scheme evident, just as counterintuitive as orange and blue, is the pink and yellow combination used for the cover of the band’s new album Big Modern and which festoons the band’s microphones and its light show. The most striking tune Goose runs though during soundcheck is “Scavenger,” from the new record and which bespeaks parachute pants circa 1985 rather than a flowing peasant skirt. It’s a taut mid tempo number redolent of No More Lies, jazz fusion keyboardist Jan Hammer’s 1983 album with Journey’s Neal Schon, although today it mutates into a jam that resembles a cut from Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow.
The sounds of Big Modern would easily appeal to listeners who, shall we say, don’t fuck with jam bands, but very much do like songs with big, fat Peter Gabriel choruses like “Good 2 Be” and “Torero,” or frantic Devo-style critiques like “Media.”
Mitarotonda is singularly focused, stopping the music a few times to discuss a finer point with his bandmates. He is lithe, resembling Little Feat’s Lowell George if his habits were health-conscious and not the sort that felled him when he was one year younger than Mitarotonda. Ellis, the new guy — and not from Connecticut but Vermont — launches percussive salvos that suggest the lean, rangy frame of the Band’s Levon Helm with the chops of Zappa/Sting drummer Vinnie Colaiuta (he also frequently features a sartorial whimsy definitely redolent of Phish’s Jon Fishman). Weekz seems perpetually under their music’s spell; after the soundcheck, while the team confers backstage about video walls that are unique to this run of MSG shows, he puts on headphones and practices long winding phrases on his custom bass guitar. And Anspach — not only a utility man, but the band’s live MC — carries himself with the cheerful levity of Trey Anastasio.
A few hours later, as the band strides to the stage while “Don’t Stop til you Get Enough” plays over portable speakers, its members are visibly enraptured in the moment. “Before you go onstage at MSG, you’re definitely going to have butterflies that you don’t have at other venues,” says Anspach. Then, for the next four hours, Goose demonstrate why they earned their place as the next evolutionary step in the jam band ecosystem, emanating gently pulsing and finally exultant songs, complete with the discursive improvisations that thrill the Jam Nation assembled tonight in one of the world’s most storied venues.
MSG sees a future in Goose because the band sold out this night, and the next (when 51 year-old Niantic Connecticut resident Paul Keuker would tragically fall to his death from a balcony), and in June 2025. Goose is easily the biggest band to come out of Fairfield County, and maybe Connecticut (New Haven’s Carpenters may hold the state title, but were a duo, not a band; John Mayer, a Goose friend and Fairfield native, who has oddly never played with them, is the biggest solo artist from the state, with the possible exception of Michael Bolton). It’s unprecedented in recent times for Connecticut to have its culture noticed at all as anything other than a boring afterthought.
The group’s proximity to New York means several things. First, they can draw — in 2025, they sold 280,000 tickets over 60 shows. Second, they can talk pizza (Connecticut has in the past decade promoted itself as “the Pizza capital of the United States,” due to New Haven style “apizz” pies). This may prompt eye rolls from New Yorkers, but no one can deny that the apizz style is an excellent Connecticut exponent, just as no one can deny that this band, presently Connecticut’s favorite sons, are pushing the jam band paradigm forward.
“I grew up loving this kind of music,” Mitarotonda says, “and once I came of age and understood the ethos how these bands operate, I became enamored. But it is more of a framework than a stylistic dogma.”
And so what prompts venom on multifarious Reddit threads, from jam band partisans who like their music just as it has been for 50 years, is precisely that Goose wants to move this music forward. As the Grateful Dead forged blues, folk, country and early rock and roll into light but heady improvisational gold, and as Phish did the same channeling the sonic stylings pf Talking Heads, Frank Zappa and Genesis, so does Goose with Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, My Morning Jacket, Vampire Weekend, and elements of trance and EDM (“Dripfield” off of the album of the same name has the textures and dynamics of a more guitar/bass/drums version of Boards of Canada).
“The Grateful Dead and Phish very much created worlds,” says Mitarotonda “and people spent their lives inhabiting those worlds.” But Fleet Foxes in particular provided an a ha! moment for the teen Mitarotonda, giving him a way into 2000s indie rock after a long period woodshedding with jazz, R&B, and classical music. “When I discovered Fleet Foxes, that opened so many doors for me, not only for my own creativity, but lots of other contemporary music that I had been unaware of.”
The show this Juneteenth night encompasses not only the kind of exultant, slow building likes of the Little Feat-style potboiler “Thatch,” that the jam nation swears by, but also takes on of Future Islands’ “Peach” and Jim James of My Morning Jacket’s “AEIOU.” Criticisms that the band takes inspiration from those acts, who are regarded like spring chickens with respect to the likes of Phish and are thus considered excessively trendy but have otherwise been around for nearly two decades, are encountered cheek by jowl to accusations that the band are false careerists. “We catch a lot of criticism from the jam scene — that how we conduct ourselves feels very rehearsed and corporate,” says Mitarotonda. “But I feel like we are what we in the band call ‘cowboy,’ fast and loose.”
And so the business of making studio albums itself is also subject to suspicion in jam nation. On Big Modern and its predecessors, Goose shows that they care about making good records; this is notable not only with respect to jam bands, which are famously indifferent to studio recordings, but also to a climate in which traditional studio time is not cost effective. Why bother then? “Making records…that’s where my heart was, is, and always will be,” Mitarotonda says. “But playing live is the dominant part of the world we occupy.”
So, Goose is willing to vary widely from the expectations of jam band partisans who like unhurried extended jams. In this, the band resembles King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, the Aussie sextet known for breakneck stylistic changes from album to album. Take Anspach’s “Pop” off the new record, which is, like, fast. Jam band music isn’t ever really fast, but at the Goose show, it hurtles into a frenetic climax of the sort that would harsh the mellow of your quotidian jam dude, almost grabbing said dude by the neck of his tie dye and shaking him. Or “Arrow,” off of Dripfield, which reaches a horns and polyrhythm lift off that brings to mind Fela Kuti.
It is perhaps these excursions off the path that has made Goose a somewhat viable concert draw in Europe. Earlier this year, the band played London, Paris and other western European cities, a remarkable rarity in that few jam bands ever venture overseas, beyond assorted Canadian dates and some at Mexican destination resorts.
“It’s not easy to book a European tour,” says Anspach, “Financially, it’s not even in the same ballpark.” While Dave Matthews Band and some post-Dead offshoots with original members did play overseas, Phish has not toured in Europe since 1998, and Dead & Company never did. Goose may break the market, buttressed by, as Anspach notes, the fact that “American fans travel over there to see the shows.”
And then there’s their covers game, which goes way beyond the jam forefathers and 2000s indie rock artistes: Thelma Houston’’s “Don’t Leave Me This way,” Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone,” Michelle Branch’s “Everywhere,” Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Love TKO,” and Clarence Carter’s deathless “Strokin’.” They also do Talking Heads “Crosseyed and Painless,” which has become a jam band standard due to its adoption by Phish.
Tim Miller, the face of the Never Trump outlet the Bulwark, has been known to wear a Goose T-shirt on MSNOW and the Bulwark’s videos. What hooked him “was a 20-minute, 21-second version of Vampire Weekend’s ‘2021,’ which is nominally a one-minute song,” he tells Rolling Stone. “I thought it was really cool that this jam band was doing covers of stuff from the recent era, instead of Sixties and Seventies material. I love their version of Kylie Minogue’s ‘Can’t Get it out of my Head.’ I also love Geese.”
Miller, who, in his college years, was the one gay participant on the Widespread Panic message board, identifies another quality that differentiates Goose. “Rick is hands down the hottest jam band frontman,” he says. “He posts shirtless pictures on Instagram, and that piqued my interest when I was learning about the band. There had been no hot jam band guys before.”
Not Bob Weir?
“No,” he scoffs.
John Mayer?
“Well now that he has gone into the jam band scene, we have another exception, but he’s not exactly for me.”
Mitarotonda, who attended the Berklee School of Music in Boston for two stints, and also lived in Fort Collins, Colorado, has otherwise remained near his hometown. “I grew up making songs in the woods in Connecticut, and it feels like home base for me,” he says. “My connection to music is the most important thing to me, and both times at Berklee, I felt removed from my connection to why I create music, even though all anyone does there is practice music all day. That experience made it very clear to me that living in Nashville or New York or towns with more of a music scene isn’t for me. I like the woods.”
Back to Connecticut, where Patriots and Red Sox bumper stickers dominate along US 95. But within Fairfield County, allegiance to the Knicks, Yankees, Mets, Giants, and Jets is not unanimous. One encounters Fairfield residents who have moved to the area from, say, Philly or Boston, and simply cannot find it in their hearts to be happy for the Knicks. But there is far less dissension regarding the new standard bearers of the jam band scene; Goose are the unquestioned champs for Fairfield’s millennial moms and dads who have spent decades going to Phish, Dave Matthews Band and Dead & Company shows. It becomes increasingly clear that jam band music represents suburban New England the way Country does southern states, and local boys Goose are the inheritors, just as much as Morgan Wallen is for Tennessee. “Dave Matthews was such a huge presence when I was a small kid,” Mitarotonda says. “And the jam scene were the shows that everyone in high school were going to.”
Unfortunately, the June 21 show at Madison Square Garden will be remembered in Connecticut, as well as the tri-state area and beyond, for the death of Keuker, who evidently was a regular in the jam band scene. Sadly, it’s reminiscent of the suspicious 1989 death of Adam Katz outside the Meadowlands in New Jersey after a Grateful Dead concert. Like the Katz incident did for the Dead community, Keuker’s death has understandably prompted reflection amongst the Goose milieu.
“We found out what had happened when we got offstage,” Anspach says. “There was a five-minute period where we thought, ‘Wow, that was a really great show,’ and then the world came crashing down. ‘Oh shit, this is insane.’ This was a wake up call: ‘we should be putting out more community support,’ and I think we did that.”
Voluble group spokesman Anspach was tasked with addressing the incident at Central Park SummerStage the next night. “There was a moment when we said ‘should we even play the SummerStage show?’ And when we went ahead with it, I was super nervous. The elegy was a powerful moment. I wanted to do my best to honor Paul’s memory and unite our community — and make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again.”
Mitarotonda is similarly affected. “I didn’t wanna be ‘that guy’ playing a show after a fan’s death, and it was hard doing so,” he says. “Our music is often celebratory, high-energy, fun, sometimes irreverent, and to do what we do in that context didn’t feel right, but I tried to find a way to speak to it. It was important for everyone to be together and process it together.”
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