A monkey, a giraffe, a pair of goth nuns, a bee holding flowers and an old-timey circus strongman made their way through the crowd last month at Luna Luna, the lost art carnival, in Manhattan.
Fans of the 11-year-old jam band Goose were wise to what they were witnessing. “They’re from the band’s lore,” one explained spying the performers, who had assembled to help announce a new Goose album, “Everything Must Go.” Soon the four members of Goose and a guest saxophonist situated themselves in the center of the crowd of hundreds that fanned out to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Ferris wheel and Keith Haring’s carousel, and began an hourlong jam.
Creative, intentional, extremely eager to please: The whole thing was very Goose.
A jam band “is like a sitcom,” said Cotter Ellis, Goose’s drummer. “When you watch a show like ‘The Office,’ after a while you feel like you know the characters. That’s how people view us — they feel they’re such a part of the scene that they actually get to know us.”
Ellis, 33, who earlier had strolled anonymously around Luna Luna dressed as a lion, added, “I like that. I don’t want to be seen as better than the crowd. I want it to be seen as, ‘We’re all in this together.’”
“Everything Must Go,” a 14-song set that features major-key tunes with lyrics alternately goofy and uplifting, a prog-y instrumental number and a new single, the Don Henley-inflected “Your Direction,” comes as the group solidifies its status as rock’s biggest “new” jam band. On Thursday, Goose will make its debut at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, followed by its first destination festival — Viva el Gonzo, next month in San José del Cabo, Mexico — and a sold-out headlining concert in June at Madison Square Garden, long the site of heralded residencies by the jam great Phish. Together, it all inescapably feels like an anointment.
“Within the community, there’s all this talk of, ‘Who’s coming next?’” said Peter Anspach, Goose’s keyboardist. “You see the lineage of the Grateful Dead, Phish. ‘Well, what’s going to happen after this?’ Is it going to be a pool of bands? Is it going to be, like, one pinnacle band?”
Goose — not to be confused with Geese, an indie-rock band from Brooklyn — has been embraced by its elders. Rick Mitarotonda, the band’s virtuosic guitarist, has sat in with Dead & Company and played with Phil Lesh and Friends. Phish’s Trey Anastasio joined Goose during a 2022 concert at Radio City Music Hall, and took his Trey Anastasio Band on the road with the young group for eight dates where they shared top billing later that year. Performing at a benefit for hurricane victims last year at the Garden, Goose welcomed Dave Matthews for a rendition of “The Way It Is,” a song by the former Dead touring member Bruce Hornsby — who has also performed it with Goose.
“They’re creating something that will expand and evolve to more adventurous musical areas for years,” said Hornsby, who guested on the song at a Goose concert last year at Hampton Coliseum, near where Hornsby lives in Virginia.
“I think their musical heart is in the right place,” he added. “They’re intellectually curious, musically.”
But as in any insular scene with its own customs, vernacular and fiercely protective fans, there has been backlash. Social media is packed with digs and memes implying that Goose is too slick, too corporate. The band has “gotten guerrilla advertising campaigns that have gotten the name out via social media,” a Reddit post said. “Their fans are convincing themselves that they’re witnessing something like 93 Phish” reads a message-board post. “Not 100 percent sold on Goose,” the saying goes.
Hidden amid the invective and gatekeeping is a kernel of truth about the novelty of Goose’s rise. It has not been a stealth “guerrilla advertising campaign,” but rather the work of savvy, ambitious musicians leveraging how music travels today to make themselves supremely available to fans.
Borrowing from pop fandoms — and some roots laid by jam royalty — Goose has been assiduous and clever about building lore like cheeky in-jokes (its self-proclaimed genre, “indie groove,” is a pun on “in the groove”), annual celebrations (one word: Goosemas) and gimmicks such as Bingo Nights, where the next song is selected by a gigantic ball generator.
Concerts are livestreamed, and soundboard recordings available to download within hours after a gig. Four shows from last year alone — including a two-night run at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., that included Vampire Weekend sitting in for a 33-minute jam on “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” — are available on Spotify.
“It’s the classic thing, of how everything seems like an overnight success,” Mitarotonda, 34, said. “It was many, many years of work. To me, it started when I was in middle school. It’s not a straight line, it’s a very weird and challenging road.”
GOOSE’S JOURNEY BEGAN in suburban Connecticut, where three-quarters of the band grew up and today Mitarotonda lives in a house purchased during the pandemic alongside a barnlike studio he built. In middle school and high school he studied jazz; he listened to the Dead and Phish, he said, “to get stoned and let my hair down.”
Trevor Weekz, Goose’s bassist and the other founding member still with the band, was into metal as well as jam music. Weekz, 35, and Mitarotonda met in high school, and later played in a band called Vasudo along with Ben Atkind, Goose’s original drummer, who left in late 2023, and Matt Campbell, who remains Mitarotonda’s songwriting collaborator.
Vasudo ended, and Mitarotonda found himself in Fort Collins, Colo., slinging tacos and itching to be in a band again. So in 2014 he put one together with Vasudo alumni, borrowing a bit of nonsensical kitchen lingo from the restaurant Dam Good Tacos — “Goose, I need three pollo”; “Carne asada, good to goose.”
Already, Mitarotonda’s listening habits were expanding. Jerry Garcia had bluegrass and Django Reinhardt; Trey Anastasio mined Frank Zappa and Talking Heads. Mitarotonda became enamored of Fleet Foxes, the Seattle indie-rock act. Other indie influences followed, including Father John Misty (Fleet Foxes’ drummer for a time, who has since sat in with Goose) and Bon Iver.
“It was two LPs and two EPs,” Mitarotonda said of Fleet Foxes’ output circa 2014, “but it was a world. The artwork, the aesthetic, the music, the melodies, the lyrics — nothing took you out of that world.”
Goose by all accounts became the band it remains today, in 2017, when Anspach, who was with the eclectic jam band Great Blue, joined as keyboardist despite being a guitarist who did not really know keys. Something of a Paul to Mitarotonda’s John — sonically obsessive, interpersonally garrulous — Anspach, 32, took on the role of concert emcee and, thanks to a charismatic mustache, the one you would be likeliest to recognize if you saw him walking down the street.
Anspach’s technical know-how and perfectionism unlocked the band’s secret weapon — accessibility — and the group started to pump out a constant stream of almost immediately available, high-quality soundboard recordings and impressive video.
“Once he joined the band, it was like I had someone on the front lines — I always picture Green Berets with knives in their teeth, scaling a wall,” Mitarotonda said. “It felt like I had had another guy with a knife in his teeth.”
Goose’s appearance at the 2019 Peach Music Festival in Scranton, Pa., is a case in point. The festival poster broadcast headliners like Phil Lesh and Friends, the Trey Anastasio Band and the String Cheese Incident in big print; Goose was the equivalent of a footnote. But its jam-heavy set — with multiple, well-edited camera angles and terrific soundboard audio — has been viewed on YouTube 434,000 times. A 38-minute clip from the 2022 Radio City show with the Anastasio cameo has nearly one million views.
“During Covid, they maybe grew, didn’t shrink,” Peter Shapiro, an impresario of the jam-band world, said in an interview. “They had their own video crew, and their streams would feature these hand-held cameras that are unbelievable. The last generation of bands didn’t have that streaming thing and the ability to self-release videos.”
Shapiro waved off talk of a conspiracy theory to boost the band’s profile. “It’s all grass roots,” he said. “It all comes from the fans and the band’s unique relationship to them.”
EARLIER THIS MONTH, Goose gathered at Mitarotonda’s barn studio in northern Fairfield County. The guitarist has a Golden retriever, Shasta, and chickens whose daily eggs are a better hedge against inflation than most of us enjoy. On a couch in the studio, next to a pull-up station, the band members discussed the things millennial men discuss — real estate, a Bill Burr stand-up routine, lunch — and then tuned, jammed a bit and rehearsed tight versions of tracks from “Everything Must Go” for a TV appearance.
“Everything Must Go,” its first studio album in three years, catches Goose over an extended period of change, like a photograph taken by a camera set to a very slow shutter speed. Most of the tracks have already been performed live, some for years; a few are brand-new. Four drummers or percussionists appear, including Ellis, the departed Atkind and the percussionist Jeffrey Arevalo — who joined the band in 2020 and left Goose earlier this year because of what the band in a statement called “inappropriate behavior in Jeff’s personal life that does not align with the band’s core values.” In a phone interview, Arevalo declined to comment on the behavior; in a statement, he acknowledged pursuing a “program” to deal with a “mental health crisis.”
Ellis, the current drummer, joined the band a little more than a year ago to replace Atkind. Ellis could well be a typical Goose devotee. While familiar with the band, he had not been a huge fan, instead preferring — who else? — Phish. But as he acquainted himself with Goose’s ouevre, he was surprised by how much he loved the music, particularly given its debt to newer sources. (Ellis has since become a Bon Iver fan, too.)
“It felt fresh and exciting, and like we could actually do something new,” Ellis said.
For a community that relishes the novelty and spontaneity of live shows, jam-band fans can sometimes be awfully set in their ways. On a recent episode of “Slow Ready,” a generally worshipful Goose fan podcast, one host proposed that Goose stop releasing studio albums.
“In the jam-band scene — I made this joke the other day — putting out records sometimes feels like extra credit,” Mitarotonda said.
But the band relishes seeing what happens to the songs in the studio. Anspach grinned while observing that the live staple “California Magic” had gotten slower (“swampy”) on the album, with in-studio horns. The title track clicked for Mitarotonda when the producer D. James Goodwin recorded and chopped up the drums, the kind of thing Radiohead might do. In addition to “Everything Must Go,” in recent months Goose has recorded more for another, future album.
In the phone interview, Arevalo, the recently departed percussionist, criticized Goose for prioritizing commerce over music: “I think it was a conscious decision to spend more time focused on growing the business and less time focused on growing the art.”
Mitarotonda dismissed the complaint — the band’s primary motivation, he maintained, is pushing its music further. But he acknowledged that as Goose has grown more popular, maintaining focus on the art has become harder. It is difficult not to notice that the album’s closing track, the anthemic “How It Ends,” is about a band driving a van off a cliff (a “metaphor,” said Mitarotonda; “super-hopeful,” clarified Weekz).
“Most artists I would imagine struggle with the chaos of everything,” Mitarotonda said.
As an example, he cited George R.R. Martin, the author of the book cycle that became “Game of Thrones.” Martin famously has not delivered a conclusion to his narrative even as the television show raced ahead and ended the story in its own, widely criticized fashion.
“He wrote these books, and they had such an impact,” Mitarotonda said. “And the show moved at a different pace, and the world moved at a different pace than his pace. And his pace is what made the whole thing good in the first place.”
Mitarotonda added, “I’m slow. I like being slow. Sometimes when you’re slow, then it happens fast. But if you try to do it fast — if you try to keep up with the fast — nothing good happens.”
Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York.
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