Sometime during set break, Rick Mitarotonda realized the band needed to make a call. The clock was rapidly ticking toward 10 p.m., and the singer/ guitarist, and the rest of the extended Goose organization, had a feeling they weren’t going to make Madison Square Garden’s 11:30 p.m. curfew.

“We had a decent amount of time to do two 90-minute sets and an encore,” he says in early July, four days after his group’s headlining debut at the New York arena. “We cut maybe one thing, but we pretty much played what we had landed on. Then, we got off stage after the first set and realized it had been like two hours and the conversation started—‘What’s this gonna look like if we go late?’ And we ended up blowing past curfew.”

Mitarotonda grew up in the Fairfield County section of Connecticut, in the shadow of New York City, and the significance of selling out The World’s Most Famous Arena was not lost on him. He admits that Goose will often craft their setlists “more last minute” than they should—with keyboardist/second guitarist Peter Anspach handling the more statistical information about what tunes might be unique for a given tour stop, or fit into a run’s overall arc, while Mitarotonda considers how things weave together harmonically and tries to thread a larger story. Sometimes he’ll get stuck and ask for input from the rest of the band, co-founding bassist Trevor Weekz and new drummer Cotter Ellis, and he mentions that it’s always great when the entire group hashes things out together.