Goose, "So Ready" / "Slow Ready"

One song, two versions, endless possibilities

Century Songs is a deep dive into the songs that have meant the most to me in the 21st Century so far, 2000-present. The songs are not ranked, and I’ll be writing about whichever ones seem right that week. For an overview of the project, click here.

First of all, I’m back! I intended to only have a single week off, but things got away from me and apparently it turns out I needed two. The time off was fantastic, which I spent at a conference in New Orleans with some of my favorite people eating some of my favorite food. Seriously, New Orleans is the best food city in America, and although I haven’t been to a crazy number of cities, I’m confident this is true. (But if you’re not into seafood, you’re gonna have a bad time. And if you won’t at least try the oysters, I can’t help you.)

So now that I’m back and I have had some time to dwell on what music from this century has meant the most to me, I’m drawn once again, of course, to the jam band conversation. For most of my life I was jam band agnostic, and it wasn’t until 2020 and COVID—plus a number of other major life events—that I found myself thinking about what I enjoyed the most in life, which includes music. So this week I’d like to talk about my relatively recent (but quite thorough) journey with jam bands: what I get out of them, what I don’t get out of them, and how my life has changed in the last four years. And to do that, I’ve decided to start at the end with Goose.

Goose is a band from Wilton, Connecticut, and they are America’s next great jam band. (More on that later.) “So Ready” is not likely to be their best known song, although I think it might be up there, thanks to the funny/silly animated video above and the fact that the song has two versions, both of which are regularly played live and serve as jam vehicles in functionally very different ways. And if I’m going to talk about this song, I kind of have to talk about both versions.

There’s “So Ready,” which is funky and upbeat, with a danceable groove and a playfulness that’s not uncommon with jam bands but isn’t always the norm. This version was released in 2021 on the EP Shenanigans Night Club, and draws from some of Phish’s post-1996 sounds (which in turn draw from their cover of Talking Heads’ Remain in Light in full for Halloween). The standout characteristic of the song for me is guitarist Rick Mitarotonda’s voice, which is relaxed yet commanding, unafraid to carry a note or deliver a line like “What’cha waiting for?” with an obvious wink.

And then there’s “Slow Ready,” which appeared on the band’s 2022 album Dripfield but officially made its live debut on 3/1/2019, albeit in a slightly different version. This version is, obviously, slower, becoming quieter and more seductive, emphasizing lines like “Where we goin’ tonight?” I’m partial to this impossibly elaborate version from 3/3/22 that leads into another Dripfield track, “Hot Tea,” but even the album version is a go-to. But while Mitarotonda’s clean vocals were a highlight of “So Ready,” the “Slow” version is most notable for the presence of auto-tune.

The auto-tune can, for any band, be just another instrument. Speaking to City Beat in Cincinnati prior to a show in 2022, Mitarotonda talked about how the tool has an “expressive quality,” while acknowledging it may have negative associations among some listeners*. Personally, I can take or leave it, but I recognize it’s not about “fixing” the song’s vocals as much as it is about finding new ways to play with and transform the human voice, not unlike using an effects pedal on a guitar.

*Auto-tune was invented in 1997 and immediately became an indispensable tool in the music industry after Cher’s 1998 hugely successful single “Believe.” The producers thought Cher would hate the effect but she apparently loved it and now we’re all stuck with it.

But before we get too much more into the song(s), I want to go back to talk about my relationship with jam bands as a whole. As I mentioned at the top, I don’t go back far with them, only listening to my first bootlegs of Grateful Dead and Phish shows during lockdown in 2020. I was aware of both bands for a long time, even remembering some friends in junior high/high school who spoke about Phish and seeing them live, but I had no context for what they were talking about. And I knew a few of the Dead’s studio albums, which is a vastly different experience than getting into live tapes. Then in 2020, like a lot of us, I found myself with time on my hands.

The truth is, in January 2020 I was let go from my job of 14 years as the company attempted to navigate a merger with a competitor and continuously shed head count.* Little did any of us know that two months later everything would be completely different, jobs would be impossible to come by, and I would be spending all day with my then-three-year-old who couldn’t go to daycare, parks and pools and zoos were closed, and everything came to a complete stand-still. There was no live music, no sports being played, movies were more or less pulled from theaters, and we all spent a couple of weeks clapping for essential workers like nurses, EMTs, and DoorDash drivers. It wasn’t great, but we all watched Tiger King together, so that was something.

*The merger was ultimately blocked by the federal government in a hilarious bit of irony.

Now, thankfully I was given a generous severance package that I was able to ride out until I found a new job later that year. But in the meantime, I found myself reconsidering a lot of what I appreciated most out of my life, especially those things that I couldn’t do anymore. (Joni Mitchell was right: you really don’t know what ya got til it’s gone.) I got back into baseball by watching old World Series games on YouTube. I started learning to make cocktails at home. And I decided, more or less on a whim, to get into Phish.

Now, during lockdown Phish couldn’t go on tour, so they started doing weekly “Dinner and a Movie” live streaming events, pulling full shows from their archives and raising money for their charity. This was a perfect time to dive into the band, chatting with others on Twitter and Reddit, following the setlists, and digging into the lore. (There is so, so much lore.) Ultimately I would consider myself a fan*, and entrée into the world of Phish to be more or less successful.

*Or “phan,” I suppose.

As much as I was getting into the music, there were a few things I was missing from Phish. Lyrically, I have to say I don’t think they are terribly strong, but then again I’ve never been as big on lyrics as I am on melody and groove, which Phish are able to lock into effortlessly. And this is probably sacrilege to a lot of jam band fans, but neither Trey Anastasio nor Mike Gordon are what I would call skilled vocalists. They are fine! Decent, even. But Goose has them beat in both the singing and songwriting departments, even if their technical skills are not (yet) up to the same level. No, where I really locked in was with the granddaddy of them all: the Grateful Dead.

Over the course of 2020 the Dead went from a band I was passingly familiar with to my all-time favorite band, and it’s not even particularly close. I figured if I was going to be listening to Phish bootlegs and watching live shows I should check out their predecessors as well. There I found everything I was looking for with Phish: beautiful lyrics from some of the greatest songwriters ever (Garcia/Hunter and Weir/Barlow), amazing guitar playing and killer harmonies, plus a deep catalog with a fascinating history, and decades of music I could immerse myself in as I found my favorites and trace how their music evolved over time. As much as I appreciated what Phish was doing (and finally got to see them live for the first time last year), it was the Grateful Dead and seeing Dead & Company more than once over the last few years that was the most satisfying. This world was unlike anything else I had ever heard, and the music is one of the things that kept me sane during those years.

So Phish led me to the Grateful Dead, and jam band Twitter led me to Goose. As with those Dead fans who have no patience for Phish, there are many Phish fans out there who look at Goose as imposters to the throne. They point to Goose’s novelty covers of songs like “Ghostbusters” and “No Rain”* as evidence that they aren’t to be taken seriously (although I feel like Phish has no business pointing the finger when it comes to songs that veer into novelty territory). History repeats itself, the old heads scoff at the young guns, and the cycle begins anew. Coming into it relatively cold, all at once, I think Goose occupies a unique space in the jam world that has only a little overlap with the bands that came before.

*Which actually is kind of amazing—seriously.

In 2022 the Midwest’s greatest jam band enthusiast/apologist, Steven Hyden, wrote an appreciation titled “Goose Is the Next Great American Jam Band.” Hyden writes about the distinct differences in Goose’s approach to jamming compared to, naturally, Phish; they have a similar “tension and release” approach, but that “songs are also catchy and pop-friendly. They sound like potential hits that, on stage, happen to include 10-minute guitar solos.” This is extremely true if you take a song like “Hungersite,” which might actually be their biggest song in that it’s the one I have heard on the radio (shout out to Chicago’s WXRT, the dad rock station). The album/radio version you’re likely to hear is, at over seven minutes, a bit long for a pop hit, but it has great vocals, some technically-impressive-without-being-wonky guitar solos, and a catchy chorus.

“It is time to shed our weapons yet, my friend?
Is it love we’ve drawn away in our desperate low?
Can we step out of the wreckage yet, my friend?
Running all against their hungry sight”

Live versions of “Hungersite” are often still accessible, even as they stretch to unimaginable lengths. The version from last year, 4/14/23 at The Salt Shed in Chicago—a show I was am still kicking myself for not being able to snag a ticket to—is essential listening from my perspective, although I suspect that the fact that at over 32 minutes it’s longer than most television episodes makes it a lot to ask of some people. (Still, I think you should press play and read the rest of this in half an hour.)

Getting back to “So Ready”/“Slow Ready,” I want to talk about the song itself and the way it changes between the different versions. Lyrically, they are the same. In a 2021 press release for the Shenanigans Nite Club EP, Mitarotonda talked about the story of the song, about a guy at a party in his hometown. “There are all of these people he hasn’t seen in a while and a girl he has unfinished business with. He always had a thing for her. It’s about seeing her, having a moment on the dance floor, and rekindling whatever was there.” It’s that playful, funny sexiness that I think draws me into the song, seeing someone irresistible and trying to entice them into your life.

And as the song kicks off, already our narrator is in full on seduction mode:

“Baby, on the way
I was melting like ice
On the back of my spine
Where we goin’ tonight?
You know I saw that eye
In the corner of the light
Playing games with my mind
It’s going down tonight.”

Phish could never! But I digress. In the song’s chorus, the dance floor seduction continues, perhaps the jam band’s answer to Usher’s “Love in This Club” (okay, okay, that might be a bit too far—although the sentiment remains).

“So ready for this, on the floor
You know I’m comin’ back for more
Take it slow, I’m burnin’ baby you know”

I happen to think “So Ready” is perhaps the most straightforward and accessible of Goose’s pop songs, and when it jams out it might have a longer intro but usually just tacks on the second track from the Shenanigans EP, the instrumental “(s△tellite).” (See this version from 5/6/21 in Charleston, SC, for an example of this). Whereas the “Slow Ready” version, like the one from 3/3/22 I shared above, has a long, jubilant second half that builds on the song’s R&B-influence with a base of programmed synthesizers and warm, warbled guitar tones that take you on a journey that builds to a powerhouse crescendo unlike anything in the normal “fast” version.

In fact, Goose isn’t the only jam band to intentionally slow down one of their upbeat classics, although it has only happened once. Here’s where I really piss off the Phish audience and tell them that I happen to think “Slow Maze” is pretty excellent, with or without the “Slow Ready” precedent. (The traditional “Maze” is undeniably better, but c’mon. According to Phish.net, “Maze” has been played over 1,400 times, roughly every six shows. You can handle a single anomaly.) When that guitar lick kicks in at the 2 minute mark and the lights turn red? You can’t tell me that’s not influenced by the boys in Goose.

And there you have it. While it’s true I’m still very much a jam band novice, never having dipped my toes into all the other bands that are part of that world (and I still haven’t heard a note of Billy Strings…), I’ve learned so much about what I want and need from music from my time with those tapes and videos. From the Grateful Dead’s songwriting, to Phish’s enthusiastic world-building, to Goose’s ability to pair complex jams with legitimate pop hooks, this has been a world that I am still discovering new things to discover and appreciate. I am hoping to finally catch Goose live on their summer/fall tour, which officially kicked off this week. I’ll be hoping for either version of this song, maybe one that stretches to 30 minutes and beyond… Either way, I’ll be the goof dancing and playing air guitar in the back.

Next week: A song about fatherhood and the pain of growing up