DOUBLE TROUBLE

There's a whole lot more to Greta Van Fleet guitarist Jake Kiszka than Greta Van Fleet, and a big part of it can be heard in Mirador, the globe-trotting riff-meister's other band. “One-take Jake” talks snarling solos, life beyond Greta and how he teamed up with Chris Turpin, his Mirador brother from another mother

- BY JOE BOSSO

THIS BUSINESS OF naming a band can be a tricky thing – and a little silly sometimes. Greta Van Fleet guitarist Jake Kiszka and Ida Mae guitarist Chris Turpin racked their brains trying to come up with the perfect moniker for the new group they had just formed. Ideas were batted back and forth... but nothing clicked. Finally, in a dramatic bolt of inspiration, Kiszka seized on a word: Marauder. He excitedly texted Turpin, who enthusiastically agreed that the name felt right. But there was just one problem: Kiszka had misspelled the word as “Mirador.”

“I was like, ‘mirador’? No, no, I wrote ‘marauder,” Kiszka says with a laugh. “Then we looked it up, and it said that a mirador is basically a vista or a viewpoint suspended on a high place, typically overlooking a body of water. That seemed to fit, and it felt symbolic being that Chris is British and he was always looking to the West for influences, whereas I looked East and got my influences from Europe. So that's how we became Mirador.”

Kiszka and Turpin met back in 2018 when Ida Mae opened for Greta Van Fleet during a run of dates at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, about an hour and a half south of Greta Van Fleet's old Frankenmuth, Michigan, stomping ground. “I was very attracted to how they had this blues element that they mixed with worldly music and this sort of ancient folk approach,” Kiszka says. “I remember watching their soundcheck before I had met them. They were these interesting, drab-looking British folks with blond hair. Chris had long hair and a goatee, and he played resonator guitar and slide. I thought it was really cool, and I connected with what he was doing.”