Peter Anspach and Rick Mitarotonda discuss the band’s new album Dripfield, staying level-headed, and their official take on jam bands.
America loves it some labels. The calculus of our understanding must be as simple as possible. Try filling out a job application or tax form without defining yourself several times over so that in some cubicle far away, you can be properly designated. Watch CNN during an election: White suburban straight women vote in this way and no other. The country’s ill-conceived plan to deconstruct the ingredients of the melting pot is part of what’s tearing the fabric of the nation apart. Just ask a Republican about pronouns and watch World War III begin.
Nowhere is this more prevalent culturally than in the arts. Everything needs to be placed into a tidy little box—otherwise our collective minds will explode upon being challenged to find a Venn diagram’s gray center. In music, if you only listen to lo-fi prog-ska, there’s a sense of ownership over the genre, and defying that ownership can become troublesome. But for the Connecticut band Goose (see, why did I have to assign them a region?), musically confronting classification has seen them rise to a new level—rarefied air for a group that’s been labeled a “jam band.”
