Goose Didn’t Just Inherit the Jam Band Scene — They Reinvented It

I t’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 “Savenger,” 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.  Related Content America’s Toughest Workout Isn’t in a Gym — It’s on the Street The Legend of Cynthia Plaster Caster The Man Who Took on Charles Manson How Bam Margera, ‘The Britney Spears of Jackass,’ Is Getting Back on Top

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.