Concert Reviews

Inside the Providence venue, the Goose show was an 1890s circus carnival — outside, a picture of terror and chaos. 

Goose at Amica Mutual Pavilion, Providence, Dec. 13, 2025, on livestream.

I should’ve woken up Sunday morning with Goose’s “Wysteria Lane” still ringing in my head. Still half-dreaming about colored balloons and animal puppets.

But Saturday night’s Goosemas was so overshadowed by the worst kind of darkness, I woke up thinking of Neil Young’s “Ohio.”

That’s a song about a campus shooting back when they were so rare we wrote songs about them. 

Two dead in Providence. Nine injured. A shooting at Brown University, just minutes away from the Amica Mutual Pavilion where Goose’s Goosemas was a technicolor dream: a musical funhouse jamboree, complete with clown costumes, an aerialist, animal puppets, confetti, thousands of colored balloons.

A contrast so sharp from the real world just outside, it could cut glass.

For the uninitiated, Goosemas is the annual holiday concert extravaganza put on by New England jam band Goose. 

Now in its 12th year, it started as “a holiday party for us and our friends” in Norwalk, Conn., as frontman/Berklee alum Rick Mitarotonda told me previously. “In the early years, we bought a bunch of kegs and a bunch of pizza.  As years went on, it grew exponentially.”

Goosemas 2025 — back in New England for the first time in years — was an all-out carnival funhouse at the AMP in Providence Dec. 12 and 13.

Think Beatrix Potter on acid. “Sesame Street” on LSD. Goosemas 2025 was “Over the Garden Wall” meets traveling 1890s circus, campy playful carnival lunacy, pageantry, with a dash of the throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks vibe of Rolling Thunder Revue. 

A massive balloon drop, confetti, streamers, masterful trippy light work, a clown’s mouth, an aerialist on silks, human-sized puppets via Best Giant Puppets — a fox, a cardinal, a monkey — a marionette menagerie, like madhouse versions of a Chuck E. Cheese band. 

Goosemas is what we’d all be doing on Saturday night if Wavy Gravy ran the world.

When the powers of Mitarotonda and multi-instrumentalist Peter Anspach —both natives of  Wilton, Conn. — combine with bassist Trevor Weekz and Bedford, Mass. native drummer Cotter Ellis, the on-stage alchemy can be electric. It was this weekend.

Their lighting rivaled Phish, another New England jam band to whom they’re often compared, along with the Dead. Their penchant for pageantry is unmatched.

Each year, Goosemas has a theme. This year, inexplicably: “Barnaby Glimpse’s Show Upon Time: A Phantom Menagerie.” 

A band that loves making random short films, they made an eight-minute short about Barnaby, a little boy who goes missing in 1734. It skips to the late 1800s when the band — playing Gilded Age dandies and scallawags — discovers the tree where Barnaby vanished, and tastes the purple goo oozing from its trunk.

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Silly, inane, a little funny, and totally absurd, the film may’ve left you wondering “Why tho?” There is no why with Goose.

My expectations for the Suessical madness on Saturday were high — yet Goosemas blew past them. 

This was a full-on topsy-turvy Wonderland circus.

The Saturday, Dec. 13 show opened with a large, glowing, tie-dye eyeball-like orb, then quietly, Mitarotonda — wearing a red suit, gold shirt, with clown eyes drawn on his face, and the same Gilded Age, steam-punk tinted round sunglasses he wore on night 1— appeared on a dark stage. Surrounded, vigil-like, by glowing gold candles, he was joined by half a dozen women in long white dresses, all with long flowing hair, some with Taylor Swift-like face-jewels and golden crowns, holding lit candles. Listed in the billing as the Providence College Chorus, their vibe was reminiscent of the sirens by the river in the Coen brothers’ classic “O Brother Where Art Thou?” mixed with 19th century Christmas choir singers.

The group delivered what started as a lullaby-like cover of Francis McPeake’s “Wild Mountain Thyme” — a play on the show’s theme.  Once Ellis’s drums hit, it became a spiritual. 

While the band knew about that afternoon’s shooting — they’d posted an Instagram story before the show —  they couldn’t, at that time, have known the full extent. But in the context of the night, with the symbolism of the college students holding vigil candles, I teared up.

It segued smoothly into a hushed “Give It Time,” with the PC choir, which broke into the kind of classic Mitarotonda guitar solo that gets the crowd screaming. Above: a massive circle of light, which illuminated the thousands of colored balloons tucked up in the rafters.

Drummer Ellis, shirtless, wore red-and-white striped overalls, an American flag-printed spiked jester’s crown, and clown-like make-up: triangles above and below each eye. 

Anspatch on keys wore a bowler-type hat, blue striped shirt, red-and-white striped vest, blue trousers with red stripes down the legs, with long clown’s eyelashes painted on his face. Weekz donned a gold jacket and striped pants. 

A fast-paced “Flodown” highlighted Rick’s skill fingerpicking, which can feel as fast as the best of old-school bluegrass banjo pickers. At various points in the night, the jam-pace became so frantic it matched the pulse of the strobing lights, which seemed, at points, to come from everywhere all at once.

A set one highlight: a cover of Brian Eno and David Byrne’s “Strange Overtones,” conjuring a high falsetto from Mitarotonda, as the stage all but glowed purple.  

After intermission, the second set started with a horn-filled cover of The Band’s “Life is a Carnival” — again, fitting the theme. 

The stage now included a large clown’s mouth door, the type you might see in carnival fun-house entryways, with old-fashioned 19th century freak show posters on either side: “The spirit of the dark horse” “The two-headed Yeti.”

A fat, funky, horn-filled “Big Modern” led into a funky, horn-filled “Hot Tea,” before the stage started glowing electric green, with fuzzy, almost outer-space sounds. Lights became strobing and twisting. People on stage graffitied over posters. The clown’s face was illuminated to look like a purple skull, lights twirled orange, greens, reds. A house music dance beat dropped.

This led into a rollicking “Factory Fiction,” which ended set 2. 

For the encore, an actor dressed in Victorian garb, playing the Barnaby character, appeared: “I was beginning to wonder when you’d show back up … I’m Barnaby Glimpse, your host tonight. In a carnival caught between tricks and delight, you will witness wonder… For tonight is the show upon time!”

This clip from night 1 also captures the feel of night 2.

Confetti burst, streamers exploded, colored balloons rained down. A menagerie of human-sized puppets. An aerialist was suddenly performing on silks. A cacophony of color and sound. A woman with a hula hoop on stage. They finally launched into a horn-filled “Empress of Organos” building to climactic jam, before the PC chorus came back in their white gowns for a quiet, hushed “Empress of Organos” reprise. The lights stopped strobing, a soft candle glow hovers over the stage. The crowd still bouncing the colored balloons, tossed from hand to hand.

Now here comes the twist.

Horrifying news on Night 2

We were driving into Providence around 6 p.m. on Saturday for Night 2 when my boyfriend’s family called. There was an active shooter in Providence. A gunman was on the loose. 

We pulled into Panera to frantically Google. An SOS alert came up on Google for “brown university shooting.”

A CNN Breaking news alert. It was the top story on Apple News. It was on the BBC’s website. The campus, some two miles from the venue, was on lockdown.

My cousin texted from Providence: a helicopter was flying over. Cop cars were everywhere. Brown was under shelter-in-place. The city might be under shelter-in-place?

We kept hitting refresh to see if they caught the guy. They kept not catching the guy. 

What should we do? Eat the tickets? Roll the dice and drive into the scene? Were we making the right choice? What if the gunman was caught in a few minutes? (He wasn’t.)

We had virtual tickets via nugs.net  to watch the concert via livestream. Should we play it safe and watch from home?

We sat in that Panera, refreshing our screens until, with 30 minutes to go until doors, we turned around and drove home. Almost in silence. Almost broken.

At home, we turned on the TV news. It was still scary out there. Chaos in a different way. The bad kind of strobing lights — the red and blue kind. Turning from CNN to the livestream (from which I wrote the above review) felt absurd.

We agonized in that Panera. But at home, I realized that to have crossed my fingers, held my breath, and entered the venue quaking and jumpy to write a straight review would be a lie of omission. Willingly putting blinders on in the most callous way possible. 

I knew that all the joy inside the AMP would vanish like so much candy floss in the rain as soon as those house lights lifted, and concert-goers exited, under heavy security, onto a street filled with heavily armed police, into nightmarish streets, a blaze of flashing reds and blues. A city on lockdown. A city terrified. 

Goosemas is the best of what humans can do together.

I sang at home. I wished I could’ve touched one of those colored balloons. 

But here’s the sad truth.

“I bought the virtual ticket because the gunman was still on the loose” is not a shocking story. 

It is a very average story in 2025.

Two kids went to school and died. Happens every day in this country. People die in shopping malls and elementary schools, at marathons and concerts, while shopping for groceries. 

Leave the house, and you might come home, you might not. 

I’m writing this on the anniversary of Sandy Hook. I’m writing this on the new anniversary of Bondi Beach. I’m writing this while Providence holds vigil.

Dec. 13 was not the day the music died. But it was a day people might’ve been afraid — with soberingly valid reason — to go hear it. 

The Providence Place Mall, next to the AMP, closed early. The AMP didn’t. The band didn’t address the shooting on stage. Goose posted an Instagram story before the show:  

“Our hearts are with everyone in the Brown University community today. Goosemas will proceed as scheduled. In coordination with venue management and local authorities, additional police and security have been put in place to ensure the safety of all our fans…”

They later storied that they were “grateful to everyone who could be here and everyone who watched at home.” 

On Instagram, fans had Thoughts.  

“So are we getting our money back if we sheltered due to the active shooter and couldn’t attend?

“Can the people who feel uncomfortable going to a live show with a shooting less than 3 miles away get refunded? @ticketmaster — I’m super disappointed, especially with many other businesses in the surrounding area closing for the night.”

“My brother and I drove in before hearing the news and ending up turning right around because it felt unsafe.” 

“Why are you letting people into the venue where there is a shooter at large?”

“Goose love y’all lots but you’re putting people at serious risk keeping people outside while there’s an active shooter nearby”

“read the room?”

For others, it was solace: 

“Not sure why Goose is getting heat … If anyone feels unsafe they can exercise free will and take action.”

“This show was all magic all night”

“This entire crew deserves the most raucous applause. What could possibly compare to this?!

“They said more with the poignancy of the music that was performed than could have been articulated verbally.”

The end of innocence?

I watched some of Goosemas night 1.

They closed Dec. 12 with a somber, goosebump-inducing cover of Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain.” 

Before the Brown shooting, it felt an on-the-nose choice for Goosemas’s overall vibe: The barkers and the colored balloons. It’s so noisy at the fair, but all your friends are there. 

In light of what happened less than 24 hours later, it felt like an ominous warning. A premonition of the end of the innocence. 

There was a time in this country when you bought the ticket, took the ride. 

Didn’t think twice about bullets. You didn’t worry about the gunman on the loose, or entering a city on lockdown. Didn’t worry about having to enter or exit a venue to find the chaos of a war-zone. 

Sitting in a Panera, anxiously refreshing your phone before the show is just how a night might go. 

When Columbine happened, I was a high school junior. It seemed then like an isolated event.

But look around, and realize the world you grew up in is gone. 

Sugar Mountain melted like polar ice caps. The cliched line: This stuff happens everywhere else — I never thought it would happen here. 

Ain’t it funny how you feel when you’re findin’ out it’s real?

Goose has long drawn comparisons to the Grateful Dead. Made jam band believers out of plenty of millennials and Gen Zers.

Writer Joseph Campbell is quoted as saying after an ’86 Dead show: “The Deadheads are doing the dance of life. This, I would say, is the answer to the atom bomb.”

I’m not so sure anymore.

But isn’t it pretty to think so?

Lauren Daley is a freelance culture writer. She can be reached at [email protected]. She tweets @laurendaley1, and Instagrams at @laurendaley1. Read more stories on Facebook here. 

Setlist for Goose at Amica Mutual Pavilion, Providence, Dec. 13, 2025

Set 1:

• Wild Mountain Thyme
• Give It Time
• Flodown
• Echo of a Rose
• Into the Myst
• Strange Overtones (Brian Eno & David Byrne cover)
• Wysteria Lane
• (dawn)

Set 2:

Life Is a Carnival (The Band cover)

Thatch

Big Modern!

Hot Tea

Jam

Factory Fiction

Encore:

• Dramophone (Caravan Palace cover)
• The Empress of Organos
• The Empress of Organos Reprise

Lauren Daley

Lauren Daley is a longtime culture journalist. As a regular contributor to Boston.com, she interviews A-list musicians, actors, authors and other major artists.

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