Spafford played Toad's Place in New Haven, Connecticut, and brought out a guitarist who did not have far to travel. Tim Palmieri, of Lotus, lives in the New Haven area, and he joined the quartet for two songs during the first set.
Palmieri came out to add a second guitar to the Spafford original "Ain't That Wrong", then stayed on for the band's take on Pink Floyd's "Run Like Hell". That cover has become a fixture: it was the 20th time Spafford have played it since debuting it on October 28, 2023.
The first of the two is where the guitar interplay did most of its work. Palmieri and Spafford's Brian Moss each took solos inside "Ain't That Wrong", which also carried a jam on Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime", and the pair closed the song with a call-and-response section rather than a straight resolution.
"Run Like Hell" went somewhere else entirely. The jam pushed toward the livetronica territory Palmieri usually explores with Lotus, with the two guitarists driving it to a peak before Palmieri took one more solo and the band returned to the song's structure to finish it.
The sit-in was not their first. Palmieri had joined Spafford once before, on "Darkness Singularity" at the JamPacked Festival in Richmond, Virginia on August 9, 2025. That is a thin history by jam-scene standards, which makes a hometown show a sensible place to build on it.
Around the guest spot, the first set opened with "Broken Wing" into "Nocturnal Emissions" and also took in "Be Strange". The second set ran "America", "Runaway", "Plush" into "The Reprise" and closed with "Levilan Shores", before a two-song encore pairing "Kiss Off" with a reprise of the Violent Femmes song.
The whole performance was livestreamed, and the band shared separate footage of Palmieri's appearance afterwards. Guest spots of this kind are the connective tissue of the rock jam circuit, which spent the same week producing several more: Umphrey's McGee and moe. joined forces in Grand Rapids, and The String Cheese Incident shared a stage with Leftover Salmon at Campout in the Pines.
The facts
- Tim Palmieri of Lotus sat in with Spafford at Toad's Place in New Haven
- He played on the original Ain't That Wrong and a cover of Pink Floyd's Run Like Hell
- It was Spafford's 20th performance of Run Like Hell since October 28, 2023
- Palmieri lives in the New Haven area and had sat in once before, in August 2025
- Ain't That Wrong carried a jam on Talking Heads' Life During Wartime
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