I do not like jam bands. This seems like important disclosure before reviewing Goose, because pretending otherwise would be like sending a vegan to review a steakhouse and having them complain about all the meat.
The Grateful Dead? No. Phish? Absolutely not. Dave Matthews Band, if we're placing him somewhere in this general universe, I can handle in clips. Maybe even enjoy him. But once a song starts approaching the running time of an episode of The Simpsons, my internal clock begins screaming.
I like edge. I like tension. I like a little violence in my music. I want guitars that sound as though they might hurt somebody. I want drums that occasionally suggest the drummer has unresolved issues. I generally prefer a song to arrive, make its argument, knock over some furniture and leave.
Goose does not operate this way. Goose would like to discuss the furniture. For 17 minutes.
And yet, Thursday night's show at Cal Coast Credit Union Amphitheater on the San Diego State University campus gave me something I wasn't expecting: enough time inside music I instinctively dislike to start questioning whether disliking it was really the interesting part.
Because Goose is very good at being Goose. And thousands of people around me seemed absolutely delighted that they were.
The Connecticut band has become perhaps the most successful new entrant into a musical lineage that stretches directly through Phish and the Grateful Dead, but Goose isn't merely a Dead tribute act for millennials with better skincare. The band combines the exploratory DNA of the jam world with indie rock, funk, psychedelia and considerably more conventional pop songwriting than some of its forebears.
The current four-piece consists of guitarist and vocalist Rick Mitarotonda, keyboardist/guitarist Peter Anspach, bassist Trevor Weekz and drummer Cotter Ellis. Its ascent has been remarkable. Goose formed in Connecticut in 2014, released debut album Moon Cabin in 2016 and spent years grinding through small clubs before a performance at the 2019 Peach Music Festival became the band's jam-scene Big Bang. From there came Dead & Company's Playing in the Sand, pandemic-era livestreams, collaborations with Trey Anastasio and Bob Weir and, eventually, a 2025 headlining debut at Madison Square Garden.
In other words, this isn't some niche hippie sideshow I wandered into. Goose has become a major American touring band.
Its newest chapter is BIG MODERN!, released in June, the band's third studio album in little more than a year following 2025's Everything Must Go and Chain Yer Dragon. Goose describes the new record as a product of newfound creative freedom, combining improvisation with pop grooves, distortion and choral harmonies.
Thursday's concert made considerably more sense once I understood that trajectory. It also helped to stop waiting for the songs to end as I researched all this on my phone.
The first set opened with "Animal," and if you're accustomed to conventional rock-show pacing, Goose immediately forces recalibration. "Animal" stretched to roughly 12 minutes. "Iguana Song" went another 12. "Borne" reached approximately 17. By the second set, "Big Modern!" ran around 20 minutes, "Thatch" about 21 and the Grateful Dead's "Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo" approximately 23. The show ran from around 7:45 to nearly 11pm, excluding the set break.
There were essentially a dozen songs in three hours. Taylor Swift could have released another album during "Mississippi Half-Step."
For someone wired like me, this presents a problem. My brain kept looking for resolution that wasn't coming. A guitar passage would build toward what seemed like an obvious climax, only to turn left and begin another musical conversation.
Mitarotonda is unquestionably a gifted guitarist. His playing can be wonderfully fluid and melodic, although Thursday there were moments when his piercing, wah-wah-pedal-heavy tone became almost aggressively shrill to my ears. Ellis' drumming was precise and tasteful, but I kept wishing he'd occasionally commit a felony against the drum kit.
That isn't a deficiency. It's a preference. And somewhere in all of this I started watching the audience instead. They were ecstatic.
People danced through passages I was mentally trying to edit. They anticipated changes I couldn't hear coming. They screamed when jams turned corners that meant nothing to me and apparently everything to them. The amphitheater was full, alive and overwhelmingly positive.
That's when an uncomfortable possibility entered my head: Maybe I'm the asshole. Not because I suddenly discovered that I secretly love jam bands. I don't. But there is a lazy kind of music criticism that treats personal taste as objective truth. If something doesn't speak to us, we declare it stupid. If an audience loves something we don't understand, we assume they're the ones missing something.
Maybe sometimes the critic is missing it. Perhaps I should have prepared differently. Maybe I should have taken a handful of mushrooms, thrown on a tie-dye shirt and surrendered completely to the experience. I don't own tie-dye, but I do own bleach, so there was really no excuse.
Instead, I stood there mostly sober, dressed like myself in all black, surrounded by psychedelic neon lights that occasionally felt like someone had weaponized a Spencer Gifts, trying to understand why thousands of people were having such a wonderful time listening to songs that refused to end. And gradually, that became the most interesting part of the night.
This entire concert-review experiment I've undertaken is supposed to be about immersion. I've spent much of my life listening to music I already know I like. There isn't much discovery in walking into a venue predisposed to adore the artist. Goose was the opposite. It was anthropology with a guitar solo.
The band's live debut of Andrew Bird's "Capsized" provided one of the night's more concise surprises, while "Silver Rising" showed why Goose can reach listeners who might otherwise recoil from the jam-band label. The second set leaned fully into the band's natural habitat, culminating in that mammoth Grateful Dead cover before the eight-minute "726" encore.
And there is something admirable about a band becoming this successful while refusing to optimize itself for shortened attention spans. Modern culture has been engineered toward smaller and smaller bites: TikTok clips, Instagram reels, hooks arriving in seconds, songs getting shorter because listeners might swipe away. Even the movie studios are changing the way they make films because people are always on their phones.
Goose asks you to listen to "Thatch" for 21 minutes. That is almost punk rock in its refusal to accommodate you. Almost.
I still wanted someone to kick over an amplifier. But Thursday night taught me something useful. You don't have to love something to recognize why somebody else does.
The people around me weren't tolerating Goose's excesses. The excess was the point. The repetition I heard was exploration to them. Where I wanted aggression, they wanted transcendence. Where I heard a song overstaying its welcome, they heard musicians discovering where the song might go. And somewhere along the way, I realized I didn't need to understand the appeal to respect it.
By the time Goose played "726" and sent everyone back into the San Diego night, I had not been converted. There will be no tie-dye purchase. Phish remains safe from my fandom. I am not following Goose around the country in a van.
But I walked out understanding the appeal considerably better than when I walked in. Maybe that's enough. Actually, maybe that's exactly what a concert review should sometimes accomplish.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars for me. Probably 17 out of 5 if you're already wearing the tie-dye.
Originally published on August 14, 2026.
Thursday's concert made considerably more sense once I understood that trajectory. It also helped to stop waiting for the songs to end as I researched all this on my phone.
The first set opened with "Animal," and if you're accustomed to conventional rock-show pacing, Goose immediately forces recalibration. "Animal" stretched to roughly 12 minutes. "Iguana Song" went another 12. "Borne" reached approximately 17. By the second set, "Big Modern!" ran around 20 minutes, "Thatch" about 21 and the Grateful Dead's "Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo" approximately 23. The show ran from around 7:45 to nearly 11pm, excluding the set break.
There were essentially a dozen songs in three hours. Taylor Swift could have released another album during "Mississippi Half-Step."
For someone wired like me, this presents a problem. My brain kept looking for resolution that wasn't coming. A guitar passage would build toward what seemed like an obvious climax, only to turn left and begin another musical conversation.
Mitarotonda is unquestionably a gifted guitarist. His playing can be wonderfully fluid and melodic, although Thursday there were moments when his piercing, wah-wah-pedal-heavy tone became almost aggressively shrill to my ears. Ellis' drumming was precise and tasteful, but I kept wishing he'd occasionally commit a felony against the drum kit.
That isn't a deficiency. It's a preference. And somewhere in all of this I started watching the audience instead. They were ecstatic.
People danced through passages I was mentally trying to edit. They anticipated changes I couldn't hear coming. They screamed when jams turned corners that meant nothing to me and apparently everything to them. The amphitheater was full, alive and overwhelmingly positive.
That's when an uncomfortable possibility entered my head: Maybe I'm the asshole. Not because I suddenly discovered that I secretly love jam bands. I don't. But there is a lazy kind of music criticism that treats personal taste as objective truth. If something doesn't speak to us, we declare it stupid. If an audience loves something we don't understand, we assume they're the ones missing something.
Maybe sometimes the critic is missing it. Perhaps I should have prepared differently. Maybe I should have taken a handful of mushrooms, thrown on a tie-dye shirt and surrendered completely to the experience. I don't own tie-dye, but I do own bleach, so there was really no excuse.
Instead, I stood there mostly sober, dressed like myself in all black, surrounded by psychedelic neon lights that occasionally felt like someone had weaponized a Spencer Gifts, trying to understand why thousands of people were having such a wonderful time listening to songs that refused to end. And gradually, that became the most interesting part of the night.
This entire concert-review experiment I've undertaken is supposed to be about immersion. I've spent much of my life listening to music I already know I like. There isn't much discovery in walking into a venue predisposed to adore the artist. Goose was the opposite. It was anthropology with a guitar solo.
The band's live debut of Andrew Bird's "Capsized" provided one of the night's more concise surprises, while "Silver Rising" showed why Goose can reach listeners who might otherwise recoil from the jam-band label. The second set leaned fully into the band's natural habitat, culminating in that mammoth Grateful Dead cover before the eight-minute "726" encore.
And there is something admirable about a band becoming this successful while refusing to optimize itself for shortened attention spans. Modern culture has been engineered toward smaller and smaller bites: TikTok clips, Instagram reels, hooks arriving in seconds, songs getting shorter because listeners might swipe away. Even the movie studios are changing the way they make films because people are always on their phones.
Goose asks you to listen to "Thatch" for 21 minutes. That is almost punk rock in its refusal to accommodate you. Almost.
I still wanted someone to kick over an amplifier. But Thursday night taught me something useful. You don't have to love something to recognize why somebody else does.
The people around me weren't tolerating Goose's excesses. The excess was the point. The repetition I heard was exploration to them. Where I wanted aggression, they wanted transcendence. Where I heard a song overstaying its welcome, they heard musicians discovering where the song might go. And somewhere along the way, I realized I didn't need to understand the appeal to respect it.
By the time Goose played "726" and sent everyone back into the San Diego night, I had not been converted. There will be no tie-dye purchase. Phish remains safe from my fandom. I am not following Goose around the country in a van.
But I walked out understanding the appeal considerably better than when I walked in. Maybe that's enough. Actually, maybe that's exactly what a concert review should sometimes accomplish.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars for me. Probably 17 out of 5 if you're already wearing the tie-dye.
Originally published on August 14, 2026.
