Like many, Goose’s Peter Anspach was in denial when the coronavirus first landed in the United States.
“A couple days after we got pulled off the road in March, I was like, ‘We’re not canceling spring tour, right? We can’t do that!’” the guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist says, as he recounts the whirlwind period last year when the entire live-music scene came to a screeching halt. “Everyone was so naïve; literally, a few days after that, everything was canceled. I thought, ‘Well, summer festivals—those will be good.’ A week later, those were gone, too.”
The forced pause was unfortunate timing for Goose: In January 2020, they had performed two shows at Dead & Company’s Playing in the Sand event in Mexico. And the musicians were about to break into the upper echelon of the modern jamband scene, with a sold-out spring tour on the books and an eventful summer—filled with festivals and marquee headlining dates—on the horizon.
“We were opening for Pigeons [Playing Ping Pong] and we had our first tour headlining 400-1,000-person rooms all sold out,” drummer Ben Atkind recalls. “It felt like our big breakout tour, and we were looking forward to all of these festivals—and then everything was just canceled.”
