Dead...Phish...Goose: Meet the rising Connecticut jam band

By Scott Mervis / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When you’re in a jam band, you can’t just come out and run through your standard set on Halloween.

You need up to your game, and that's what Goose did last week in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“We brought back our Netflix-and-chill kind of thing,” says keyboardist and guitarist Peter Anspach.

Goose opened with set with the spooky “Stranger Things” theme and entertained the Goose flock with a set of songs from the sci-fi show including Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),” Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” and Tear for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”

“We learned the songs in the four or five days leading up to the show,” Anspach says. “We just did like a bunch of work at soundchecks and backstage to prepare. And that was really fun, actually. The band has been together for 10 years and we had all been playing in various bands even before then, so we’ve amassed a lot of songs over the years.”

Goose’s sense of fun and way with a cover has endeared the band even more to the jam scene, in which they’ve been rising through ranks for the past decade. They’re now set to headline the Petersen Events Center on Thursday night.

Goose formed in Wilton, Conn. in 2014 with a lineup including singer-guitarist Rick Mitarotonda, bassist Trevor Weekz and drummer Ben Atkind and released their debut, “Moon Cabin,” in 2016. Anspach became aware of them while a member of the band Great Blue.

“At the time,” he says, “my band was struggling to just get gigs. And I really wanted to be a musician. That was my thing, since college. I was a music business major and then at some point I was like, ‘Man, I don't know if I can work for musicians. I think I need to be the musician.’ It was kind of a big change for me.”

He spent four years grinding with Great Blue and booking the shows for the band before getting the in with Goose.

“Goose had a booking agent at the time,” he says, “so when they asked me to join, I was like, ‘Hell yeah. Then we just go out and play some shows?’ I already liked the Goose music, so it was a natural thing.”

If you’re a fan of the Grateful Dead and/or Phish, there’s a good chance you’ll like Goose. The Connecticut band offers the sweet flow and groove of those jam-rock icons, lush harmonies and also a hint of modern indie rock.

“I think Goose is such an amalgamation of so many different styles of music and so many bands,” Anspach says. “Phish and the Grateful Dead are definitely major influences on us. And then like all the modern bands we like: Vampire Weekend, Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Tame Impala. That stuff is all a major influence, too, so it's just a combination of all these things — just the love of improvisational music and jamming on stage.”

The jam scene started to catch on to Goose soon after Anspach joined, starting with a tour opening for Arizona jam band Spafford.

“I had been in the band for like four shows, so everything was new for me,” he says. “We were just put in front of a ton of people and it was the best look the band ever got at that time.”

Thanks to Spafford, they developed an unusually faithful base in the Kentucky/Cincinnati area, the same area that hosted the Resonance Music and Arts Festival at that time. In 2019, they were a hit at the Peach Music Festival in Scranton, leading to an even bigger break: joining Dead & Company’s Playing in the Sand festival in January 2020.

Next on the agenda was their own sold-out tour planned for April 2020.

“The hype was, like, insane,” Anspach says. “We were like, ‘Holy [expletive], here we go!’ And then it all got canceled and I was like, ‘Damn, I hope that wasn't it.’”

Goose made the best of the COVID-19 pandemic, playing a series of popular livestreams, working on second album “Shenanigans Nite Club” and then going on their Bingo Tour of drive-ins with setlists determined by the result of a live bingo game.

“I feel like we really didn't stop working and really kept going,” Anspach says. “We worked on the record and basically finished it during the pandemic. We probably wouldn't have finished it otherwise just ‘cause we were on the road all the time.”

During the making of “Shenanigans,” Anspach was sharing a house with Mitarotonda and their percussionist/drummer friend Jeff Arevalo.

“We were together every day, and that was huge,” he says. “We had all that time together to just brainstorm ideas and work on music. And I don't think Jeff would have joined the band if that didn't happen either. Because we were at the house working on ‘Shenanigans’ and Jeff was recording so many parts and we were like, ‘Damn, it would be kind of great to have percussion in the band again. Maybe Jeff should join the band.’”

Released in the summer of 2021, “Shenanigans” marked another leap for the band. It arrived in the wake of their 20-minute re-imagining of the Vampire Weekend song “2021,” created at the request of Vampire Weekend vocalist and guitarist Ezra Koenig.

In June 2022, the same month Goose released their third album “Dripfield,” they played two nights at Radio City Music Hall with Father John Misty and Phish’s Trey Anastasio, who stayed on for the whole third set. They would tour with the Trey Anastasio Band that November and then join Dead & Company in Mexico again in January 2023.

In terms of building a band, there aren’t many communities better than the jam scene.

“I love it. We're so blessed,” Anspach says. “The fans we have are the best in the world. The beauty of the scene is that people are coming to see the music and to see their friends and to hang out and be in the environment. We’re so grateful to everybody for coming up to multiple shows, wanting to see different songs, talking about the music. The discourse is great. It's all super fun. And I was a part of it even before I joined Goose. I loved to go see Dopapod and Phish. I’m a fan.”

Goose, by the way, is easily confused with Geese, a heavier, post-punk band from Brooklyn that has opened in Pittsburgh for Jack White and Greta Van Fleet.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone come to our show and be like ‘I thought this was Geese.’ But, yeah, it was definitely really funny when they popped up,” Anspach says. “We were like, ‘What?!’ But, yeah, all good. They are a much different band than us and they’re also pretty sick.”

With this tour in advance of a newly completed record, there’s a change in the backline for Goose with departure of Atkind, for “creative and personal reasons,” and the arrival of Cotter Ellis.

“I've known Cotter for a long time,” Anspach says. “I used to play shows with his band, Swimmer, and my band, Great Blue. We were playing together at weird festivals in the Northeast and small clubs in Connecticut for a long time. His band was based in New Hampshire and they were always just incredibly fun to play with because they were just like one of the sillier bands — in a good way. They didn't take themselves too seriously. Cotter was just hilarious and an amazing drummer. His energy has been incredible for our band. It's just been exactly what we need.”

They play the Petersen Events Center, Oakland, at 8 p.m. Tickets start at $39; ticketmaster.com.