GRETA VAN FLEET
THE ONLY WAY IS UP
Had you blinked in 2019 you might have missed Greta Van Fleet on their flight to the stratosphere. With a new album about to turbo-charge the engines, they’re getting even closer.
Words: Polly Glass
How do you survive lockdown with your twin brother? For Josh and Jake Kiszka, Greta Van Fleet’s singer and guitarist respectively, it’s all about space. Happily their capacious Nashville pad, where they’ve hunkered down for the past year, has plenty of that. Listening to them chat about their living situation over Zoom – with a curious mix of schoolboy gusto and the self-assurance of two worldly hippies – it’s hard not to think of childhood sleepovers (with a bigger budget).
ALYSSE GAFKJEN/PRESS
“We have a rehearsal space here and we’ve just been non-stop jamming around,” quietly earnest guitarist Jake says with a grin. “Testing out new material and stuff and playing it ourselves and bringing new things in.”
“I’m surprised Jake and I haven’t killed each other!” Josh says in a separate call the next day. “But it’s three storeys, so he has his floor, I have mine, and there’s this sort of middle ground. It’s like a battlefield, if you want to look at it that way.”
When we talk, the pint-sized singer (the eldest of the two by five minutes) is sitting in their large, stylish kitchen nursing a hangover. “A world of hungover!” he declares good-naturedly. Josh declares things a lot – it’s a bit like watching a young, moustachioed hybrid of Ron Howard and Owen Wilson holding court at a cocktail party. “We had a long meeting last night, and I thought: ‘Oh, I’ll get through this by drinking!’ And now I regret it!”
“We’re touring with all this equipment, all of these people, all of this gear…
It’s been wild.”
Jake Kiszka
What’s your poison?
“I like a good red wine. I think that’s where it’s at.” Currently they’re renting, although Josh has his eye on a swishier place in town. “I almost bought this house, a beautiful house,” he enthuses, “this mid-century modern which I really love. So at this point I’m kinda rolling up my sleeves going: ‘Alright, we’ll design this thing!’ So right now I’m looking for architects.”
Josh Kiszka is 24. But then everything has happened so quickly for the Michigan band (completed by younger brother Sam on bass and keyboards and Danny Wagner on drums) that the young frontman’s architectural aspirations are arguably just in proportion with the world he currently inhabits.