The summer of 2019 seems, in retrospect, like a simpler time. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was in theaters. People online were excited about Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell. The Trump era was still in full swing but the election was only one year away. Covid had not yet taken over the world. Hope was in the air. And then there was the sudden emergence of what might be the next great American jam band.
I don’t remember the first time I heard about Goose, a quintet from Connecticut that at the time was still a quartet. I just know that one day that summer I had never heard of them, and then the next day I heard about them constantly. You might not know what I’m talking about; my social feed tilts toward what can only be classified as “Jam Twitter,” where debates about the merits of the most recent Phish show and full-blown arguments about whether Dead & Company plays too slow are in abundance. In that corner of Twitter, the takes came hot and heavy about a band whose overnight success story — sparked by a video of their star-making performance in July of 2019 at The Peach Music Festival in Scranton, Pa. — belied a slow but steady rise that commenced in the mid-2010s.
