Goose Lays a Golden Egg

An evening with the Connecticut quartet gave us goose bumps

Once in a while we’re blessed with conversion moments. They may not be exactly on the scale of Saul on the road to Damascus, but life-altering nonetheless. We had a conversion moment this week at Live Oak Bank Pavilion in Wilmington, NC, where we saw Goose hold forth for more than two brilliant hours.

And what is this Goose of which you speak, a reader might ask. Briefly, four guys got together in 2014 when founder Rick Mitarotonda got bored with slinging tacos in Colorado, rounded up some old bandmates for a new venture, which they named after some of the kitchen patois from Dam Good Tacos (“Goose, I need three pollo”), struggled in the beginning while searching for a groove, then broke through during the pandemic with live “podcast” tours, came out on the other side with a new drummer, a growing repertoire that included several well-crafted studio albums and, importantly, an identity and a mission.

It’s fair to call Goose a “jam band,” to the extent they play long, improvisational songs. But they’re sharp, these guys, and young. They have more discipline than the granddaddies of jam rock, the Grateful Dead, and more of a pop sensibility than one of their most obvious influences, Phish. Their musicianship (a couple of them are Berklee-trained) is superlative without being exhibitionist. They describe themselves as “indie groove,” which is kind of funny (in the groove, get it?) and like all good jam bands, draw on a variety of genres to create their sound. They opened their first set in Wilmington with “My Mind Has Been Consumed by Media,” which could have fit on Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light” and a few minutes later ripped into a cover of “Green River,” the Creedence chestnut, that stretched into a 10-minute funk fest. Like adding yogurt to a smoothie, they mellowed the mood by closing the set with two ballads, “Borne>Give it Time,” that displayed their affection for Bon Iver, Bruce Hornsby, and others in the genre I call “Highway 101” — melodic, sincere, crisp and clear, with a propulsive but laid-back rhythm.

This was our first time seeing Goose. The crowd was super relaxed; lots of people were still taking their seats when the band started playing. Coming in, I told my wife that I’d probably be the only guy not wearing shorts; I think I was right. The average age, I’d say, was in the mid-40s, with a good dose of the gerontocracy and a surprising number of young children with their parents. Most of the people around us knew the songs and mouthed the words. The first set was solid, we agreed, so we were eager for the second, which is typically when a good jam band will spread its wings.

That they did. The second set was a remarkable extended performance in the shape of four songs. They warmed up with a piece called “The Empress of Organos,” which honestly was a little impenetrable, especially for newcomers like us, but that quickly gave way to “A Western Sun,” a nearly 20-minute piece in three movements — a lyrical opener, a long section highlighting the band’s musical acrobatics, and then an emotionally intense closing movement driven by Mitarotonda’s tightly focused, waterwheel leads that lifted listeners into classic tension-and-release space. This official video released the next day gives you a sense of the orchestral sweep the band commands.

The song that followed, “Creatures,” was a singular moment — one long, continuous groove, a massive EDM-arrangement based on an irresistible guitar lick that seemed to build and release infinitely. The band simply cooked, sweeping up nearly every sentient soul in attendance. There comes a moment experiencing all great art when the observer loses a sense of self as it’s enveloped by the artist’s vision. The ancient Greeks called it ekstasis, or the state of standing outside or transcending oneself. We call it ecstasy. Either way, the song was transformative, binding the 6,000 or so souls in attendance into a single listening entity. The band seemed to feed on the audience energy, going through several launch-and-land cycles, each a little more intense than the one before. The effect was exhilarating. The song lasted about 20 minutes, but it might as well have been two hours or the entire evening. Time effectively stopped.

Magnifying the effect was the lighting. It didn’t just complement the band, but created a whole environment. Live Oak Bank Pavilion has a big stage, and the lights filled every centimeter of it, spinning pinwheels of primary colors, pulsing strobes and a spectacular effect of vapor-filled cones of light that took on a three-dimensional presence. It was intense, immersive and reality-shifting, like standing in front of David or “Guernica” for the first time. The audience erupted in cheers at the conclusion, safely back on terra firma as the band segued into “Silver Rising,” but by then we were on our way out. We’d had a peak experience. There was nothing left to listen to; the conversion was complete. We’re Goose fans now.

Back to the genre — jam bands are an acquired taste. They don’t always provide quick hits, like a Taylor Swift or Teddy Swims, where a song is clearly defined, quickly developed and consistently delivers the same emotional message. Good jam bands, by improvising something different with each performance, take risks and ask the audience to join in the risk-taking. Rick Rubin explains the phenomenon in this clip. In many ways, jam bands are an antidote to our time of continuous scrolling and instant gratification. Improvisational music takes its own time. Sometimes there’s resolution, sometimes not. Mitarotonda once compared their music to the novels of George R.R. Martin (“Game of Thrones”), who famously still hasn’t concluded his multi-book saga.

“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.”

“I’m slow,” he said. “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.”

We went slow at the Goose show. Then we went fast. We were converted in a small way — we became fans and are now going deeper into their library. But we were converted in a more subtle way too, simply because of the experience of immersion and communion, the gift of ekstasis, if only momentary. It shifted some molecules. We watched Goose lay a golden egg and it was good.

Peace out.