“I can remember
the warm summer nights
driving so fast
we ran every red light
I can remember
the feeling is gone away”
-moe., “Blue Jeans Pizza”
Summer 2025 is officially over. Like many American summers, it blazed hot and long, leaving behind a trail of indelible memories we’ll be parsing, decoding, and mythologizing for years to come. Amidst the tumult of the season, I made my way to three jam band-centric festivals strewn across the Northeast for WAMC to report from the ground on the state of the vibes in 2025. Along the way, a burgeoning interest and appreciation in the institution known as moe. – the beloved stalwarts who have represented New York state on the jam scene since forming at the University of Buffalo in 1989 – blossomed into full-on fandom. After my fateful decision to see a band I’d never seen before at a festival I’d never heard of – the Disco Biscuits at the Catskill Mountain Jubilee in 2022 – paid out like a slot machine and found me my New Favorite Band of that season of my life, I decided to apply a similar logic to moe.’s January 18th performance at the wonderful Bearsville Theater in Woodstock. I drove down from Western Mass alone on a wet, icy night, with no expectations beyond the band’s archival recordings I’d listened to in passing over the years. Knowing little about the act, it only took three songs into their first set to fall in love as they settled into the smokey morass of “Opium.” Often, jam band fans favor frenetic energy as the hallmark of a dynamic and exciting band. moe.’s 20-minute exploration that unfolded that winter night was very different, a mid-tempo masterclass in patience, communication, and the ability for a six-piece band to fill every corner of the sonic canvas with carefully balanced and well considered elements. The final product was more than the sum of its parts, turning a bluesy shuffle into something mysterious and magical, each pocket mined for something arcane and thrilling, the ultimate accomplishment of improvisational music. It amounted to nothing short of a revelation to my newbie ears. When that was followed by a glorious pairing of “Kyle’s Song” and “Kids” to close out set 1 – a duo that yielded the kind of celestial mid-transition jamming I associate with the Grateful Dead’s iconic “Scarlet Begonias”>”Fire On The Mountain” territory – and a dark, electrifying “Lazarus” in the second set replete with ambient jam, I knew that my ever-whirring brain had found a new band to fixate on. When a trio of summer festivals all featuring moe. came across my radar, I knew I had found the perfect control element through which I could experience and consider each of the three events.
With that said, here’s what I found.
Northlands Music & Arts Festival, Swanzey, New Hampshire, June 14th, 2025
The first time I went to the Northlands grounds was in June 2021 to see Connecticut jam wunderkinds Goose on their triumphant summer tour, their first proper venture around the states following the COVID lockdowns of the year prior. It was an incomparable experience to once again see live music after months of dread, panic, and a distinct feeling that life would never fully recover from the psychic damage of the pandemic. The show was wonderful, yielding an iconic rendition of their most identifiable anthem, “Arcadia,” and with the welcome surprise of a Radiohead cover – “Weird Fishes” – and the debut of proggy instrumental “The Labyrinth,” it was immediately an unforgettable show. I found it agonizing to peel myself away from that New England hillside once the band hit curfew, rain be damned. I just wanted more.
Fast-forward to June 2025, it was a pleasure to return and finally explore the Northlands Music & Arts Festival in its fourth year of existence. From the buoyant energy of the attendees, performers, and vendors, you couldn’t be faulted for forgetting that it was an unseasonably cool and dark day, with little rivers of rain runoff bridged by plywood trickling through the muddy festival site. The environment was something like a post-apocalyptic encampment of friendly pirates, a cheerful, arts and crafty rejoinder to Mad Max. Colorful outfits, lights, art installations, tents, and enthusiastic performances from the likes of Soulive and Cory Wong lit up the swollen gray clouds above, and by the time moe. began their headlining set, Northlands had successfully established a bonhomie that defied the underwhelming weather. If people not being on their phones is the best measure of a truly immersive experience in 2025, this festival slam-dunked the overall vibe.
What followed felt celebratory. moe. opted for a one-two opening that paired a shaggy, beloved classic – “32 Things” – with a recent addition to the songbook, the soaring, heavy psych rock tune “Yellow Tigers.” It’s a contribution by keyboardist Nate Wilson, who brought it with him from his project Ghosts of Jupiter when he joined moe. as a permanent member in 2023. The wise decision to bring Wilson on fulltime was underscored later in the set as he sang an entrancing, spectral rendition of “Planet Caravan” that unspooled over the hillside as dusk settled in over Northlands. It’s the exact moment you dream of with a festival, where the environment and music seem inseparable, when a concert has evolved from an event to something indescribably beyond the day-to-day. The “Kyle’s Song” that oozed out of the drippy Black Sabbath cover was frosting on the cake. The second set, which featured exemplary versions of jam vehicles “Timmy Tucker” and “Opium,” was punctuated by a pulverizing cover of Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’” with Kanika Moore on vocals. The vibes were immaculate. Posted by the soundboard, I met friendly festgoers eager to connect, make introductions, distribute handmade trinkets, and celebrate the opportunity to dissolve into a summer night alongside fellow jam band obsessives. The site was easily navigable, had a great food truck zone with picnic tables aplenty, and not much of a bathroom line to complain about. I had a great time.
Bite of the night has to go to Keene, New Hampshire’s own Frisky Cow Gelato. The honeycomb gelato was a creamy, sweet, earthy celebration of New England, much like Northlands itself.
Mountain Jam, Belleayre Mountain, Highmount, New York, June 22nd, 2025
From the hillsides of southern New Hampshire, my next festival took me into the misty mountaintops of the Catskills. The long, winding drive through thick forests, stunning vistas, and charming mountain towns from Western Mass to Highmount successfully whet my appetite for the return installation of a cherished Upstate festival that had lain dormant since 2019. Look, any festival with a ski lift is immediately placed in rarified air. Within minutes of making it to the steep mountainside the mainstage lay perched on, I paid my $10 for unlimited gondola rides and was whisked into a thick cloud hanging over Belleayre Mountain as Molly Tuttle and her band played below.
Emerging hundreds of feet above the festival into a complete whiteout not dissimilar to the eerie environment of Japanese survival horror game Silent Hill was unbelievable. I became an instant fan for life of the band Free Whenever, who carved out long psychedelic grooves in the otherworldly space of the mountaintop shrouded in cotton candy-thick precipitation.
After catching a slice of Goose drummer Cotter Ellis sitting in with another band on the summit of ol’ Belleayre, I grabbed a return gondola back to the main stage for another dance with moe.
The show's setting is crucial to the attendance bias-inflected celebration of any jam band adventure, and the Mountain Jam backdrop ranks among the most breathtaking of any I’ve experienced to date. Behind the bands, the staggering beauty of the Catskills range unfolded, a rich tapestry of greens and blues and grays that seemed to slowly morph as entire weather patterns navigated the peaks and valleys like whales drifting through the ocean. To stage right, a steady stream of gondolas flowed up and down the mountain as the bands played on. It simply doesn’t get much better than that, folks!
moe., no strangers to the festival, leaned into zones they particularly excel at to celebrate the return to Mountain Jam – the gooey, Dead-quoting central jam of singer/guitarist Al Schnier’s rocker “ATL,” the Steely Dan adjacent jazz rock of “Blue Jeans Pizza,” and the dosed Southern rock of the Allman Brothers’ instrumental “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” – before capping off the set with an epic, gleeful performance of their signature song “Rebubula.” Time seemed to stand still as percussionist Jim Loughlin’s marimba took centerstage around eight minutes in, shimmering and echoing off the mountain above before the entire band fell in for a climactic final jam. Delightful.
The aforementioned Goose capped off the festival with a headlining set that ranks among the best of the 11 performances I’ve caught from the band since 2021, and one of the best shows I attended in 2025. A first set sit-in from harpist Mikaela Davis elevated the proceedings, gilding Goose original “Rosewood Heart” and Radiohead cover “Weird Fishes” with a psychedelic, baroque quality that was perfectly attuned to the magical environment of the Catskills.
A can’t miss “Jive Lee” closed the first set with a knotty, dark jam underscored by a looming, anxious synth swell by keyboardist Peter Anspach that built to an explosion before coming to a less ominous landing before the break. The second set was nothing but white-hot playing, beginning with a “Hungersite” that plumbed the song’s depths to great success, pulling off the jam band magic trick of taking the audience somewhere entirely unexpected from a well-known origin over the course of 23 minutes. The almost half-hour long sandwich of “Echo of a Rose” into the National cover “Bloodbuzz Ohio” back into “Echo of a Rose” that followed is thankfully as phenomenal on record as it was in Highmount that day, and the set-closing 20-minute rave up of beloved live staple “The Empress Of Organos” was a total throw down as Mountain Jam attendees attempted to aggressively boogie to their greatest ability while not tumbling down the mountainside. Righteous. The cover of the Band’s “Don’t Do It” for the encore was a fitting tribute to the region’s rich musical history, and the perfect soundtrack as I made my way back to the parking lot.
I was not the only WAMC staffer in attendance. The great Samantha Simmons offers her own review of Mountain Jam:
“As soon as you pulled up to the mountain you knew you were going to have a good time. Between the gondola, sprawling vendors, and insane views, there was bound to be something for everyone.
The closer, jam band Goose, played an incredible and diverse show. Some fanatics would say it was their best show of the tour.”
Look, obviously the band’s headlining debut at Madison Square Garden the following weekend – a four-hour, curfew-breaking instant classic – is going to take up a lot of oxygen in the “Best Goose Show of Summer ‘25” conversation, but, dang, don’t sleep on what went down at Mountain Jam. A stunner.
The Adirondack Independence Music Festival, Charles R. Wood Festival Commons, Lake George, NY, August 29th, 2025
The third and final Northeastern fest I hit for WAMC this summer took me to the shores of Lake George, resplendent as always in the perfectly cool air of late summer, my favorite microseason. It was an ideal evening to watch the last waves of tourists rushing to board steamships for a sunset glide across the mammoth body of water and follow the developments in that night’s Mets game, in which rookie Jonah Tong made his victorious debut against the Marlins in what devolved into a mockery of baseball with the almost incomprehensible final score of 19-9. I always love going to jam band shows upstate, because as a devout Mets and Bills fan, it’s inevitable that I run into fellow masochists in love with doomed franchises as we groove out under the night sky in some nook of our lush and expansive corner of the world.
The Adirondack Independence Music Festival is tucked snug as a puzzle piece into a park just steps from the Lake George lakefront. It was easy breezy getting in, out, and around the little fest, which was full of that heartwarming sight the jam band scene is rich with: old friends embracing, once again united across the decades to enjoy music and a band that has survived tragedies, victories, horrors, and marvels to well earn the “most resilient band on the planet” sobriquet given to moe. during their introduction.
While the first set had its share of highlights – namely, the closing trio of slow-burn mid-tempo jams “Calyphornya,” “Living Again,” and “Water” – it was the second set that proved to be one of the best I’ve caught in 2025. As only moe. can, the band turned possible defeat into unexpected triumph. After tech issues causes guitarist Chuck Garvey to throw his telecaster on the ground in frustration during the set-opening “Meat,” a reliable well of jam potential infamously released as a 45-minute long single on Sony during the band’s major label era, front man and bassist Rob Derhak swapped instruments with Garvey. The gesture, ostensibly to help sort out whatever was going on with Chuck’s setup, began a wholly unexpected and entirely original section of jamming that joyously blurred well-established lines and inspired the band to new heights. Enough cannot be said about Derhak, one of the jam scene’s most underrated songwriters and musicians, who resembles a cross between Jerry Garcia and Jeffrey Ross, exuding a confident kindness that I always enjoy basking in. And he shreds on bass! Nice! Anyways, the unique, tech issue-driven improv kicked off a sequence that saw a palindromic sandwich of “Meat”>”Timmy Tucker”>”The Other One”>”Puebla”>”Timmy Tucker”>”Meat” that is exactly the kind of dense and ambitious playing you dream of from any jam outfit. This is my first year – barring 2020 – of not seeing Dead & Company live since 2019, and hearing drummer Vinnie Amico howl an iconic Dead song like “The Other One” in the heart of a setlist he himself constructed was cathartic and scratched a deep itch. The encore of “Ups and Downs” and “Wind It Up,” flush with sentiments like “Every season that has come my way/All the best ones are with you” and “I think you'll agree/We're better together/Than we are on our own,” was the idyllic way to close out the show and the season writ large.
While I enjoyed a bevy of concerts throughout the summer, these three festivals – three opportunities to break away from the violent shortcomings of mainstream culture and national politics – will stand as vivid reminders of how lucky we are to call the Northeast home. We are rich in music, rich in friendship, and adventure waits around every corner.
See you on the lot,
Josh
