Providence, Rhode Island – One thing about a Goose concert: you are gonna feel the funk. The Connecticut‑based jam-rock band has spent the past decade turning its annual Goosemas show into a full‑blown holiday ritual – part concert, part community reunion, part beautifully weird tradition – that has long outgrown its scrappy backyard roots.
“We started Goosemas as a way for us to see our buddies when they came home for the holidays,” said Jon Lombardi, Goose’s Video Crew Chief and childhood friend. “For the first couple of years we just had kegs of beer and pizza and played music with close friends.”
As Goose gained popularity, the gathering evolved from a keg party to an army of followers at dive bars, eventually becoming a two‑night, sold‑out spectacle at Providence’s Amica Mutual Pavilion, where more than 14,000 fans filled the room on December 12 and 13 for a glowing fusion of sound, light, and shared wonder.
“Our fans are kinda like Deadheads, but different. They’re hard to define, but they definitely don’t just show up for the music or a party. They come for that feeling of being a part of something bigger than themselves,” said Lombardi. “Rick and the guys set out to build a community from day one, and the music is just the medium used to draw everyone together.”
2025 has been nothing short of an epic year for the indie groove quartet known for its long, improvisational live shows. Comprised of lead guitarist and vocalist Rick Mitarotonda, Peter Anspach (keys, guitar, vocals), Trevor Weekz (bass), and Cotter Ellis (drums), Goose released two new studio albums, two live albums, and sold out Madison Square Garden with a five-hour performance – the longest concert ever held at the hallowed arena. This was all while touring continuously throughout the U.S. and getting better with each stop.
When I arrived at my hotel in Providence on the first day of Goosemas XII, it was clear that something exciting was going on. The lobby was bustling with people of all ages wearing ripped overalls and 80’s-era jean jackets, mingling and laughing as a girl in leotards and a tutu walked around handing out candy canes.
From the Holiday Inn Express to the waterfront docks to the downtown outdoor ice-skating rink, there was static electricity in the air everywhere you went.
According to the Goosemas XII itinerary, the band’s reps had set up some daytime activities over the weekend like fan meetups for coffee and a thank-you luncheon for event sponsors, and the helpful online guide let fans know about event parking, afterparties, and where to seek medical assistance if needed.
I drove into the quaint New England town just as the sun slipped behind the horizon and the town slipped into Goosemas mode. When I passed the Amica Mutual Pavilion on my way to find parking, I saw hundreds of fans – aka honkers – waiting in line at the front doors, presumably trying to get a good spot on the general admission floor. It was 20 degrees and windy, but everyone was smiling and animated while waiting patiently for the doors to open.
Meanwhile, on the side streets around the arena, nitrous oxide tanks whooshed as cold gas filled colorful balloons that were passed along for cash, the tank owners yelling out special deals of the day: “Three fatties for twenty!” and “Jumbos here, only ten dollars!”
Music played from somewhere and horns honked as the streets were blocked by serpentine lines of pedestrians, making it impossible for vehicles to move. You could spot fans by the way they moved around – carefree and whimsical, outgoing and laughing. Close to the time the concert was about to begin, downtown was humming with action.
As I walked down a set of steps to the backstage area as the sound check ended, I ran into Mitarotonda, Goose’s frontman and shaman, unexpectedly, and we exchanged some friendly banter before the band’s keyboardist, Peter Anspach, passed by me going to the dressing rooms.
“Merry Goosemas, Peter,” I said, sounding like the fanboy I am. “Have a good show.”
“Thanks man, I love this,” he said with a moustached smile. Anspach has told Jambase in a previous interview that Goosemas is one of his favorite times of the year. “I love how everyone gets into the spirit with us and they dress up and come to life.”
Back upstairs on the arena concourse, the anticipation was thick in the air as diehard fans who dressed like the Grinch or a fairy princess or a lemon (yes, one dedicated soul wore a lemon costume that I later saw bouncing up and down in the crowd) danced and spun around in the concrete hall past long beer lines and uniformed security guards.
One guard, “Jimmy from Boston,” told me that even though he thought this was all a little weird, he appreciated that “the fans are polite and seem to be having a lot of fun.”
As I took it all in, I saw the band’s counterculture. It was a community. Whether it was organizing a food drive, advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, or volunteering at fan‑led charity events, the Goose crowd lived its values as loudly as it danced.
The band’s emphasis on mental health and safe spaces – especially those focused on queer and trans youth – wove seamlessly into the narrative of the “phantom menagerie,” turning what could have been pure spectacle into something more like a ritual of care.
The stage was covered with surreal carnival props, imagery for the theme Show Upon Time: A Phantom Menagerie – a dreamlike, colonial‑era rock opera set in “Lovering’s Hollow” in 1734 telling the story of the strange disappearance of 10-year-old “Barnaby Glimpse,” hinted at in Goose’s social media leading up to the event.
Paper moons hung above the stage, floating above a ghostly tree with gnarly limbs. Smoke curled from behind velvet curtains as the lights faded and the mayhem began.
The band walked onstage to their usual places, dressed in colorful Victorian‑meets‑psychedelia garb and joined by multi‑instrumentalist Stuart Bogie, whose sax and clarinet runs would add warmth to the quartet.
“Is everybody feeling good?” Anspach asks the sold-out crowd as he sits down behind his keys.
From the first notes of “Dramophone,” the boundary between concert and theater, between musician and actor, dissolved. “It feels like we’re at a hippie carnival,” uber-fan Heather Eldon said, standing next to me in the wings. “This is fucking fire!”
I agreed with her as a ten-foot-tall puppet – a yellow monkey – lurched past me into the photo pit to meet his friends. The dozen puppets towered over the front row, with the puppeteers hiding behind gigantic feathers or faux fur or sequins draping down.
“Creatures” dropped next, igniting the first wave of chaos and control that Goose has perfected over the years.
Mitarotonda resembled a master of ceremonies from Barnum and Bailey’s circus, wielding his custom rosewood “Empress” hollowbody guitar like a whip to tame the audience one minute and release a riot of four-on-the-floor energy the next, shaking the very foundation of the arena.
Hundreds of animal-shaped balloons rained down from nets in the rafters as I made my way around the outside of the floor section, looking at the ground to be sure I didn’t step on toes. “Hey!” a petite redheaded girl said as she stopped me. “Look up at those laser beams, mister, it’s like a rainbow of notes.”
Karissa West, as it turned out, was from South Carolina and had driven 14 hours non-stop to get there that day – and she was right. The lighting at every Goose show was a phantasmagoric array of green halos, purple haze, and fire‑engine‑red “laser beams” that jumped with the deep staccato beat of Cotter’s bass drum – the signature of Andrew Goedde, the lighting designer fans had rightfully dubbed Goose’s “fifth member.”
“When I close my eyes I can still see the trails,” West said. “Is the music guiding the lights or are the lights guiding the music?”
“Good question,” I said. The swirling colors felt less like stage lighting and more like a living, breathing organism; at times during the concert I looked at the light show more than the stage, mesmerized.
“Atlas Dogs” segued seamlessly into “Red Bird” and “Silver Rising,” before the band exploded into Pink Floyd’s “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” a first for an ensemble known for choosing esoteric covers. Ending the night with “Dripfield” felt necessary and cool.
Can Music Heal Our Fractured Hearts
It was gloomy when I rolled out of bed on Day Two of Goosemas. I skipped the afterparty the night before (which I heard was banging) and was eager for another round of apex music, so I headed to downtown Providence early to sight-see.
Around four o’clock, while I was paying for my dinner, an unthinkable tragedy unfolded nearby.
A mass shooting took place at nearby Brown University, killing two students and critically wounding nine others. It was one of the deadliest incidents in Rhode Island’s history, and Motif sends our condolences to the families of these innocent victims.
Not to be flippant, but the ethos of Goose and its fans was that the show must go on, and so it did. Without words, fans comforted each other in merch lines and wiped away tears for the victims. Everyone knew what had happened just a couple of hours ago and just a couple of miles away. Because of this, there was an unspoken reverence – a quietude under a layer of joy for the band – that we all carried close to our hearts.
The house lights dimmed. Scattered and mumbled conversations in the arena erupted into the loudest cheers I had ever heard.
Mitarotonda stood alone center stage, bathed in an amber spotlight from above as the Providence College choir levitated from backstage to the left and right, lustrous hair flowing over snow-white choir robes, the fabric draped in a full circle like a cape around each singer.
Their harmonies filled the arena with “Wild Mountain Thyme,” a song rendered almost sacred in that context. A young Haitian choir girl sang like an angel from the heavens, and I poked my head up from the photo pit, looked at the band with the choir, then turned and looked at the crowd in awe, a tear in my eye.
A somber elegy had started night two, but it didn’t stay. Fans raised candles and phones, faces illuminated by a soft, golden wash. The arena had turned into a hushed cathedral before the drums pulled the song into a soaring spiritual. The key shifted, tempo built, and suddenly the refrain wasn’t mournful – it was hopeful, radiant, alive. The choir flowed into “Give It Time,” and the entire crowd seemed to breathe out at once, like a communal exhale and a reminder that healing can be incremental and shared.
“Go ahead, give it hell, give it all you got or give it up for something else.
A revelation, a hallelujah, it’s the nature of the spirit running through ya…
turn it up and let it go…turn it up and let it go…turn it up and let it go.”
The rest of the night balanced ceremony and abandon: songs like “Flodown,” “Into the Myst,” “Wysteria Lane,” and “Strange Overtones” kept the thematic thread of transformation while still leaving plenty of room for dance‑floor chaos, swirling horns, and the kind of three‑dimensional jamming that keeps the Goose faithful chasing shows.
By the final song, when the arena turned into a full‑blown carnival of characters, light, and sound, the sense in the room was less of escape and more of collective recalibration – a community deciding, together, to let happy smiles be an act of resistance.
During the 20-minute encore, to my left there was a beautiful swan doing aerial yoga twenty feet above the crowd on the floor. To my right, hundreds of balloons and tons of confetti dropped onto the grateful fans, and the Monkey Man puppet brought its friends back out for another dance.
The room moved, yet time stood still; the worst in one had brought out the best in many, and the band played on.
The Power of Musical Collaboration
But the night’s funk wasn’t over. Just a few blocks from the arena, the Goosemas XII afterparty was just beginning, with Pigeons Playing Ping Pong taking fans on a psychedelic funk odyssey at The Strand Ballroom & Theatre.
The Baltimore quartet of 17 years are close friends of Goose, and Anspach regularly sits in with Pigeons on keys. As the stragglers made it through the doors to the sold-out show, Pigeons’ lead vocalist and guitarist Greg Ormont graciously waited as he explained the connection between the two jam bands.
“Some people don’t know that Goose used to open up for us on tour,” Ormont said. “So that means if you open up for Pigeons, you’ll go on to sell out Madison Square Garden!”
The packed room erupted as the opening notes of “Time to Ride” reverberated over the heads of die-hard fans and 90 minutes of rainbow-colored symbiosis began. The Pigeons create a disco church wherever they land, and playing over 200 live shows a year has garnered them a cult-like following called “The Flock.”
After a night filled with many hours of dancing, tired groups of happy faces passed by me on their way out of the Strand near dawn, and I caught some of the band by the stage at the end of the revelry.
“This was a sweaty, hilarious full‑circle moment for both bands that showed exactly how this scene sustains itself,” explained the Pigeons phenom bass player, Ben Carrey. “By lifting one another up.”
Guitarist Jeremy Schon agreed. “We are so proud of Goose and what they’ve accomplished, and they really, really care about their fans. Just look at things like the sober tables at their concerts and how they support the gay and trans community,” he said. “It’s cool to be a part of their journey like they were a part of ours. Yeah, what Ben said…full circle.”
Goosemas has always been as much about the people in the crowd as the ones on stage, and Providence proved how deeply this fanbase has evolved into a self‑sustaining community. Online threads and in‑person conversations from the weekend were overflowing with gratitude, descriptions of the show as “pure mayhem” and “absolute perfection,” and heartfelt reflections on how, in a painful news cycle, this gathering reaffirmed that love, positivity, and weirdness still have room to breathe.
By Sunday morning, as fans trickled out of Providence clutching posters and grinning through their fatigue, one truth lingered under the falling white snowflakes of the town: Goosemas may have scaled up to arenas and headlining status, but it never lost its center. It’s still about music that gathers people, light that feels human, and a collective beat that keeps on expanding.
And a Merry Goosemas to all.