Goose’s Close Encounters

The first time the members of Goose realized that some of their heroes noticed what they were doing happened one night on the road in 2019. They were in the van, driving overnight back home to Connecticut, as keyboardist Peter Anspach plugged his headphones into the Apple Music show Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig. 

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“I was just listening to an episode,” Anspach recalls, “and, all of a sudden, he just starts talking about Goose. I’m like, ‘Wait, this can’t actually be us. Like, how does this guy know who we are?’” Soon, Koenig was chatting with his guest, music journalist Steven Hyden, about their Goose appreciation, and Anspach turned to his bandmates. “I was just like, ‘Guys, listen to this!’ And then a few seconds after that, everybody saw a UFO.” 

Their ET encounter wasn’t close, and Goose were not abducted, but the buzz of hearing themselves talked about by Koenig was just a hint at things to come.

Over the next few years, they found themselves onstage not only with Vampire Weekend, but also members of the Grateful Dead and Phish—a musical lineage that Goose openly embraces as a next-generation jam band.

The band’s just-released new album, Everything Must Go, is a wide-ranging demonstration of the creative gifts that have attracted such high-profile collaborators and a growing caravan of fans. It’s their first album since 2022, with 90 minutes of music that combines organic grooves with an increasing skill for melodic hooks. Many of the songs were written during an especially creative period for the band in 2022, and were recorded over the next two years.

“I’ve always just been drawn to good songs, good hooks,” says singer-guitarist Rick Mitarotonda. “When I was younger in the ’90s and the early 2000s, chasing hooks on the radio was one of the most exciting things to me in the world. You hear some great chorus on the radio and have no idea who the artist is, and then you have to go on Napster and try to type in the lyrics to figure out what the song was. It was thrilling. I just loved those songs and loved all the good writing, regardless of the style.”

For what eventually became Everything Must Go, several songs were performed live on stage almost immediately after they were written. Some will be familiar to fans who have heard them played in concert by Goose. “For a lot of these songs, there was this impulse to play them right away,” says Mitarotonda.

At one show in Bend, Oregon, in early 2022, the band spent part of their soundcheck finalizing the song “Silver Rising,” finished writing the second verse, and then played it that night in concert. Goose had just released a new album, Dripfield, but were already inclined to share the newest songs in their repertoire. “On that tour in early ’22, we debuted a new song that wasn’t on the new record like every week,” says Mitarotonda. “There’s definitely an excitement to it.”

That meant several songs had been fine-tuned by the time Goose began recording sessions in 2023, largely squeezed in between tour runs. They just couldn’t help themselves.

“We just kept adding songs to the record,” Mitarotonda explains. “We were like, ‘Oh, this is exciting. Let’s add this song.’ We literally just kept adding songs up until the last minute, which is a fun problem to have.”

On their second album, 2021’s Shenanigans Nite Club, Goose were still very much in DIY mode, with a hands-on approach to every detail of the recording. For Dripfield, the band opted to hand the steering wheel to producer D. James Goodwin, “which was really liberating at that point,” says the singer-guitarist. For the new album, they chose a balance between the two approaches, still working with Goodwin but choosing the overall direction themselves.

“It was more of a conversation between us as opposed to us surrendering to his ideas … honoring both his and our instincts equally,” says Mitarotonda.

The 90-minute final run time was mostly intentional, since it would be three years since the last album, and because the band knew that fans were ready for a flood of new music. “They’re pretty down for as much as we can give them usually,” says Anspach. “Coming out with a three-LP album isn’t necessarily going to scare anyone away. They’ll probably just dive more into it.”

The album’s title, Everything Must Go, refers to the idea of a band clearing the decks, in preparation of starting fresh in their next phase. “I’m sure as time goes on, we’ll make other efforts to have more of a concise statement—concise albums,” says Mitarotonda. “But for right now, the impetus was just to get it out and keep the ball moving, wipe the slate clean and, and move forward, you know?” 

Opening the album is the gently urgent title song, which offers commentary on modern life and the need for infinite stimulation, and what Mitarotonda calls “bearing witness and being patient and present, while we’re scrambling around trying to keep ourselves entertained.”

On “Dustin Hoffman,” Goose create a funky, driving take on their “indie groove” sound. It was named after the Oscar-winning actor mainly for his role as a hilariously mumbling criminal named Mumbles in the 1990 film Dick Tracy. That’s because early recordings of the song didn’t have lyrics beyond Mitarotonda mumbling into the mic. But the track’s ultimate message cut especially deep for the singer, as “a veiled commentary on where I’m at right now,” he says. “There’s a search I’ve been on for a long time, of trying to overcome some physical, mental, emotional issues, trauma, things like that. Opening more of myself to life is something I’ve been working on for a long time now.”

“Lead Up” has a thrashier sound at times, and began as a song Mitarotonda first wrote at age 13 or 14, a time he remembers as a period of creative discovery and total freedom, before he knew anything about songwriting. With a bit of updating and polish, the song was ready for Goose.

“I was just so inspired and wide-eyed at life and making music, writing songs, discovering music at that time,” he says. “It was probably my favorite period of my whole life. So reconnecting with songs I wrote then, before I knew anything about music feels like a potent thing for me personally.” 

As with any self-described jam band, at least some of these songs will continue to evolve on the road through nightly improvisation. “The fun stuff really happens when we open up an area of a song that we’ve never opened up before,” Mitarotonda says.

Before Goose, Mitarotonda played in several unknown bands, but seemed to find his voice in a group called Vasudo. It turned out to be an important bridge to the band that Goose became. Vasudo was founded by Mitarotonda and his friend Matt Campbell, but it ended after a year and a half, and the two musicians went their separate ways. They reconnected in 2022, and their songwriting collaborations continued for Goose. That makes Campbell a bit like Goose’s version of Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. 

“He’s definitely a strong lyrical force, but he’s a strong musical force too,” says Mitarotonda. “He’s a very talented songwriter.”

Like their major influences Phish and the Dead, Goose has seen a vibrant fan culture emerge around their shows. It’s much like Anspach remembers his days as a young music fan going to Phish and Dave Matthews concerts while he was in high school and college. “Diving into those communities was pretty special,” he says. Phish’s habit of making recordings of a concert available to fans soon after left a strong impression. “Being able to dive in that quickly to all the songs I didn’t know was really awesome and special. They did a great job of allowing people to dive in and get deep. That’s definitely something we try and do, also.”

In the early days, Goose drove to gigs in a van, sleeping in their hand-made bunks while parked overnight in Walmart parking lots.

Within a couple of years after Goose emerged, an indie rock band called Geese began playing shows. Goose and the Brooklyn act have yet to cross paths, but Mitarotonda says they are both booked at the Newport Folk Festival this July, so a Goose/Geese summit might be in their future.

For Goose, the band’s name came from an inside joke among employees at a taco shop where Mitarotonda worked in Fort Collins, Colorado. “It was like a Smurf kind of word,” he explains. Workers called one another “goose,” and the word was frequently used as a substitute for “carne asada” and “to go” or anything else as needed. 

“It had nothing to do with the bird,” Mitarotonda says. “It was just the word. It was a very silly, stupid thing, didn’t really make sense, but when you’re working long shifts in a hole-in-the-wall taco place, it was very funny. I thought it’d be a funny name for a band that played funk music in bars in Norwalk, Connecticut.

“There were numerous times where we tried to shake the name or I tried to shake the name at least. As things got more real, it was like, ‘All right, we should probably get a real band name.’ Never happened.” 

One label he insists the band has never sought to discard is “jam band,” though some interpreted certain Mitarotonda comments in interviews as him not wanting that title at all.

“My commenting at one point that ‘jam band’ isn’t the most eloquent of terms got mistaken for, ‘We’re not a jam band,’ or that we don’t want to be a jam band,’” he says. “That’s not really the case. We obviously improvise quite a bit and enjoy doing so, and have no intention of stopping doing that.”

Mitarotonda notes that Phish’s Trey Anastasio recently mentioned in an interview that the term didn’t even exist when his band started in 1983, so it’s hardly a sacred designation. Whatever Mitarotonda may think of the specific words, he says, they fit the band like a cozy goose down coat. “It ultimately doesn’t matter at all,” says Mitarotonda. “The fact of the matter is, we jam, we improvise, we write songs. We are a jam band.”

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