“It was the last day of recording, and the engineers have packed down all the mics and the drums, and Dave said, ‘Fuck it. We need another fast one. You’ve got half an hour. Go down, write it and come back…’”
Vocalist and guitarist Chris Turpin is describing the breakneck tempo of writing and recording Mirador’s debut album in the humid depths of the night in Savannah, Georgia, under the exacting eye of veteran producer Dave Cobb, a nine-time Grammy Award winner.
The intensity of the story is at odds with the bucolic setting in which it is told. It’s a Sunday afternoon and Chris and Mirador bandmate Jake Kiszka (better known as guitarist with globe-conquering rock band Greta Van Fleet) are sitting in the beer garden of one of the oldest pubs in England, wafting wasps away from their drinks and trying to explain how they captured lightning in a bottle at first attempt with Mirador’s eponymous debut album.
Dark, brooding and twitching with unpredictable energy, the record is the kind we all grew up on – even if we were born too late to be there as it happened. It’s a record whose spiritual home is a live BBC TV soundstage, somewhere in the early ’70s – or perhaps a churned festival field somewhere in Somerset in ’69.
Or maybe a setting older still, somewhere in the dim folkways of pre-war America and pre-industrial Britain.
It has guitar solos that launch out of the speakers like crooked javelins, vocal performances that seem ripped out of the singer’s heart like pages from a profane bible – and its sound is steeped as much in the folk music of a lost England as it is in blues.
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Listening to it, you wonder, ‘Why did we stop making records this way?’ Once upon a time, guitarists like Hendrix played from the hip with such complete abandon yet still said something profound with every bar. But ever since then, some might argue, we have traded the intoxicatingly volatile spirit of that kind of rock for increasing precision and replicable virtuosity.
Mirador want to go the other way and, in the best sense, they have succeeded. Yet there are also contemporary textures and sounds, making it a striking beast on the landscape of modern rock music – an album deeply rooted in tradition and made like bands used to do, without a click-track in sight, yet very much of its own time, too.
For Jake Kiszka, the journey is not without risks. Greta Van Fleet are already one of the world’s most acclaimed rock acts and not without reason as their epic, soaring reimagining of the classic rock idiom has gained them a huge and obsessively devoted following around the world.
And Jake’s role as guitarist in Greta has placed him on a pedestal that few ever get to stand on. So when Mirador embarked on their recent debut US tour opening for Greta Van Fleet, Kiszka knew he – and the otherwise all-British Mirador line-up rounded out by Nick Pini on bass and Mikey Sorbello on drums – would be under the microscope.
!["The thing just happened in a spontaneous moment, and Mirador became what it was," Jake Kiszka says; [from left] Nick Pini, Chris Turpin, Kiszka and Mikey Sorbello.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/J7cpfqUGJPutoKqtByCxCB-1200-80.jpg.webp "“The scrutiny we were under lent itself to the atmosphere of the record. We really had to come out swinging”: Jake Kiszka and Chris Turpin on conjuring old-school guitar magic for Mirador’s debut – and the difference between US and UK guitar players 24")
“I think the scrutiny that we knew we’d be under lent itself to the atmosphere of the record. It was like everybody had their back or backs up against the wall. So we really had to come out swinging,” Jake reflects.
Lest that sound melodramatic, Jake and Chris recall their surprise when they realised that, between their first ever live performance and the second, fans had pieced together the lyrics of Mirador’s songs, despite none being made public as recordings at that stage, well enough to sing them back to the band as they played.
Kiszka and Turpin met when Chris’s roots-rock duo with Stephanie Ward, Ida Mae, were supporting Greta Van Fleet six years ago. A common interest in the folk music of America and Britain brought Kiszka and Turpin together and tour-bus jams gradually coalesced into a conviction that the pair should write and record something together that stood apart from their other work.
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The other resolution was that the outcome would fan life back into the embers of rock as it used to be written and performed – spontaneously, almost recklessly, with a match-fit band and an electrifying live feel to the resulting recordings.
So with Kiszka and Turpin back in the UK to promote the debut Mirador album, Guitarist joined Jake and Chris to talk about the increasingly forgotten influence of folk on rock, the crucial importance of playing at high volume, what a great SG can do that no other Gibson electric can, and why working with only minutes to get a take can provide the jolt of pure musical electricity that is missing from all too many recordings today…
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You both have successful bands with their own distinctive sounds – so how and why did Mirador spring into life?
Chris Turpin: “Mirador was entirely unplanned. We got friendly and were just hanging out and trading licks. Jake played on an Ida Mae album, and we got to be pals that way and sort of had curry and drank beer and did what friends do.
We had a whole record in a matter of a week. At that point, it was like, ‘There’s something taking shape that is, in some ways, out of our hands
Jake Kiszka
“And then Jake said, ‘Hey, do you want to do something?’ And I kind of went, probably too arrogantly, ‘Well, if we do something, we do something’ – it has to be good, you know? And then that’s when the writing process began.”
Jake Kiszka: “Chris and I got together, we’re like, ‘Let’s just write a couple songs for fun, you know, in that stage of things.’ And I had this old Victorian house in East Nashville [where] we got together and started writing a few tracks.
“The first day it was like, two or three songs. And I was like, ‘Well, this is quite fast – a matter of a couple hours. So let’s try for some more tomorrow.’ And that process went on, but by the end of the week, we basically had 12 tracks – we had a whole record in a matter of a week. At that point, it was like, ‘There’s something taking shape that is, in some ways, out of our hands.’”
Mirador’s sound has plenty of American folk-blues influences, but you can also hear the influence of seminal British folk guitarists such as Bert Jansch and Martin Carthy in your music, even though it’s very hard-rocking in places. That’s quite an unusual blend in this day and age…
Jake: “So many of my influences growing up were European artists and traditions. I really looked to the UK, specifically, for a lot of that stuff, and Chris looked to America for a lot of those influences.
“So I learned a lot of early English folk music, and some of the bands that I really loved had some elements of that, like Fairport Convention and some of that lineage. So when I was playing with Chris early on, it was a surprise – and something that I really enjoyed – that Chris could do all that stuff.
“I think that was a huge part of getting British players [to form the band] who could come from that influence. Because, you know, you don’t really get that in America. Even with the amount of technology and resources we have to learn and listen to new music. It’s like there’s this sort of built-in thing about British players so they can kind of do that. And I think that was a huge part of what was interesting in making something different [with Mirador].”
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Chris: “Yes, growing up in the UK, you take it for granted – what you have around you – and you look to America as so many Brits have, and it’s vastly more exotic and cool and interesting. And that’s why, while my dad was taking me to go and see Bert Jansch and Fairport and all these folkies coming through, growing up with John Martyn and Nick Drake sort of glosses over you.
I was learning the thumb-picking styles and no-one was teaching me that. I was just absorbing it and pulling it off old CDs…
Chris Turpin
“But you’re like, ‘What’s that? Is that Bukka White? That’s cool!’ I think because you can’t get it, you can’t find it, you can’t read it, and it just becomes much more intoxicating. As well, I think at the age that I heard that music, I discovered the likes of Free, Fleetwood Mac at the same time as The White Stripes and early Black Keys. So it was all sort of homogenising to the same thing.
“And then I was seeing a lot of acoustic players – Martin Simpson was the first person I saw play slide, for example. I saw Bert Jansch, and I was learning from Stefan Grossman DVDs how to play country blues.
“I was learning the thumb-picking styles and no-one was teaching me that. I was just absorbing it and pulling it off old CDs… Celtic guitar-playing meets country-blues playing, meets ragtime, meets Piedmont blues meets whatever it might be. As soon as you pull anything onto a flat-top acoustic guitar… when you put it into that context, they’re really not that distant from each other.”
“But it was like you say: some British folk elements have been disregarded and I have various theories for why they have been. For example, one morning at 2am, I said, ‘Jake, you’ve got to listen to Martin Carthy. Listen to this.’ I think you thought for a second I was probably insane…
“Anyway, we ended up writing Roving Blade, which is one of my favourite tracks on the album, after listening and diving into those songs. We went to Bradford-on-Avon and saw Martin Carthy just after Jake came over to the UK. We only saw half the show because you’d just stepped off a plane. But we got a picture with him.”
Jake: “I think what was so fascinating to Chris and I was, how can we take this stuff that we were influenced by, that we really love, and inject it into what we’re writing in a fresh, new way? And that was a big part of the challenge. So I think one of the successes of this record – for me, personally – is that we were able to take some of those ancient folk sensibilities and translate them in a very modern way.”
Chris: “I went to see Martin Carthy at the Green Note [in Camden] and he played to about 12 people in the afternoon. He was talking about folk traditionalists and [lampooning them as] very sort of jacketed, intense individuals, telling musicians about ‘the way it should be done,’ and ‘What version is that?’ and ‘You’re playing it wrong. Don’t sing it like that! It’s too inflected’. And Martin Carthy basically said, at the ripe old age he is: ‘Fuck that – pick it up and take it and do whatever you want with it. Just change it. It’s the whole point. It’s a living, cultural moving target.’”
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There are some incredible guitar sounds on the album – and in terms of tones, it’s layered up with all kinds of classic guitar sounds. Did the gear you both used stand apart from what you normally use in Greta Van Fleet and Ida Mae respectively?
Jake: “I would say yes, I tried to get further away from the world that I have been living in for some of the previous Greta records. And that’s just guitar selection, amplifier selection, and obviously through what we were doing in our songwriting. I think probably what I end up using on a record is typically what’s closest at that moment.
When we were forming Mirador, it was a question of whether I was going to bring in my guitars or my amps, and I decided to try something different and build a new vernacular of different licks
Jake Kiszka
“But when we were forming Mirador, it was a question of whether I was going to bring in my guitars or my amps, and I decided to try something different and build a new vernacular of different licks and things like that – look at myself as a separate [kind of player] within Mirador.
“So, yeah, I did bring my 1961 Les Paul – the ‘Beloved’ – with me to the studio. And I use that quite a bit. That’s kind of my fallback approach, to use that. But I think there were a handful of guitars that I brought that maybe showed up.
“But Dave Cobb is a guitar player as well and he has quite a significant collection of really beautiful and historic guitars that do very particular things. He had a Telecaster there that I used quite a bit; I think it was a white ’56 Tele. And there was an early ’70s Burgundy Sparkle 12-string 335. And that was actually given to me by Daniel Wagner, Greta’s drummer, as a birthday gift. And so any time I did 12-string stuff that’s what I was using.”
Chris: “Dave also had a Danelectro that once belonged to Daniel Lanois. It had a lipstick pickup in the neck and a Tele pickup in the bridge. That was quite important and it got used for overdubs on Ashes To Earth.”
Jake: “The Danelectros have a very particular sound with those lipstick-tube pickups – great dubbing instruments. With a lot of this stuff, what the material was calling for was humbucking pickups. And then Chris and I would end up layering it up with [further parts recorded with] single-coil lipstick pickups.”
Chris: “On the acoustic side, Dave had an astonishing Martin 000-28 that you used for a lot of the acoustic stuff. We’d just done the end of the first opening tour with Greta, so we had our Martin ‘Mirador’ guitars with us. And so for Must I Go Bound I used my Martin ‘Mirador’ and Jake used a Martin nylon-string.”
Jake: “Yeah, I used that for the solo in Must I Go Bound, so that was interesting. There was also a black 50s J-200 of mine, a really early one, that got used. That was really fun, finally getting to use that for some stuff – because there was a lot of layering of acoustic over electric on the record. There was also a late-60s Flying V that showed up halfway through. You remember that?”
Chris: “Yeah, it’s the really cool one [of the type] that Andy Powell used on Argus by Wishbone Ash. So, for me, on the guitar side, I used my ‘Mirador’ Martin for the acoustic stuff, although I use Jake’s Duolian resonator for the track Ten Thousand More to Ride. And then it was my ’66 Strat for most things – for example, Roving Blade was that ’66 Strat. And then the ’70 Les Paul Custom was used for [the album’s debut single] Feels Like Gold and most of everything else.
“Then the only other thing I used, Dave has a ’57 Sparkle Gretsch Duo Jet, which he got from the Gretsch family, that has that shimmery Gretsch thing. Actually, I tell a lie – I used the black Trini Lopez for overdubs.”
Jake: “That was actually a new Gibson Custom Trini Lopez, but it turned out to be an incredibly good one.”
Sometimes guitarists can go into the studio determined that a certain instrument they love is going to define the sound of a record, but often something completely different emerges as a better option once the music starts flowing – even gear that just happens to be lying about in the studio. Did that happen on this record to any extent?
Chris: “We had that with amps. Jake had just been touring a Selmer Zodiac, but it was a rare Zodiac, like a 30- or 35-watt one with two 12s. And you weren’t quite happy with the sustain on it, but it sounds fucking cool. And I had this ’62 brown Fender Pro, which has a big, rich 15-inch speaker. We were loving the mix of those live, but you put them under the microscope of the studio and we both reverted to different things.”
Jake: “They definitely made for great live performance amplifiers, but they didn’t translate in the same way to the studio. So that was interesting. We really ended up using a lot of combo amps.”
Chris: “Dave had a Marshall Lead and Bass 20 that had been modded by Dumble and Dave had paid him [Alexander Dumble] with a Nutribullet! I used that through a 112 or a 115 Supro cab, a newer one. And I used a [Fender ’62 Princeton Chris Stapleton Edition] for a couple of tunes…”
Jake: “I used the shit out of the Princeton…”
Chris: “You have a silver-panel Princeton that Dave gave you, which is a badass amplifier with a 12-inch speaker. That was the bulk of the tone for Jake. And we used a black-panel Vibrolux Reverb for some of the dubs, too.”
Jake: “It ended up being that Chris was doing the classic Marshall-stack thing to a certain degree, and I would kind of come in with a combo somewhere around that. We used a newer silver-panel Fender Champ, too.”
Chris: “With Heels Of The Hunt, it was the last day of recording, and the engineers had packed down all the mics and the drums, and Dave said, ‘Fuck it. We need another fast one. You’ve got half an hour. Go down, write it and come back.’ So that’s what we did.
“The engineers suddenly panicked and ran around like shit, putting the drum kits back up, rewiring. And Dave, as we were sort of writing and arranging things, he has a black-panel Champ and a silver-panel Champ. They’re normally mic’d up and they sound great – Heels Of The Hunt is just those two Champs cooking…”
Who is it that whoops in triumph at the end of the track?
Jake: “Mikey [laughs]”
Chris: “That song was literally written and finished 10 minutes before we cut it…”
Jake: “It was a stream of consciousness, from thought and completion to record immediately. And if you listen to the end of that track, you can hear Mikey breathing [hard]! That was only, like, two takes or something. That’s all Mikey ever got – or anybody got.”
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Jake, you’re one of the highest-profile SG players in rock for decades. What should a good Gibson SG be, in your view?
Jake: “A good SG? Well, the early ’60s ones – which were [branded] Les Pauls at first – with the thinner neck are highly microphonic. If you tap anywhere on the body and it’s making that sound, it’s just very thin lacquer. Mine’s basically been sanded off [by playwear] entirely. So the thing about an SG that differentiates it from other Gibson guitars is that it’s really microphonic, and you can feel every nuance of the guitar.
“And so, for me, that’s highly important because I like to play guitar as if it’s a full-body thing. I really like to play with my body – and even pulling the neck slightly back and moving things and tapping on it. It’s responding in more than just one way. It’s not just the strings and the connection between that and the pickup.
“Obviously, the early humbucking pickups, the Patent Applied For pickups, those are significant to that sound. And I find that early Les Paul/SGs have some of the greatest [examples of that style of] pickups. The thing about those guitars is that they all sound so different from one another – it’s radical and I have yet to find one that sounds like my ‘Number One’, outside of the one Chris has ‘stolen’, right?”
Chris: “The guitar I call ‘the one that got away.’”
Jake: “Yeah, but it didn’t exactly get away…”
Chris: “It was from Vintage ‘n’ Rare Guitars and I may have swiped that guitar from underneath Jake – after he swiped a very nice Park amp from underneath me! [laughs]”
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Jake: “Only fair. I’ve swiped a lot of things.”
Chris: “You know, even in Jake’s sphere, you’re lucky if you’re even able to play a lot of those ’61 SGs because Jake hasn’t had backups [for his ‘Number One’]. We were going to guitar shows and every time you’d see one and pick it up to try it – especially those ’61 SGs – you know, acoustically, whether it’s going to do the thing or it’s not going to the thing very quickly. They’re not all the same at all.
“So this particular one that I stole from underneath Jake has some of the thing that Jake’s guitar has, but there’s a nuance to it that is separate. Because Jake’s guitar is very lively. It’s got a real bark and it’s really agile, and there’s a huge amount of dynamics in those pickups, even for fingerpicking.”
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Jake: “An SG, I think, is a really dynamic, dynamic guitar…”
Chris: “…which you wouldn’t necessarily think of a humbucker-[equipped] Gibson guitar. But that’s not the case when you get a real one.”
Jake: “That’s the thing – and I value it highly – that you can play soft, but you don’t even have to change the volume or tone knobs. I’ve seen so many people with actual Les Pauls – the Golden Age rock ’n’ roll guitar heroes – who are really controlling the guitar [with volume and tone knobs] a lot, yeah?
“But with the SG for me, I can play really gently and have my amps turned up as loud as they’re going to be for the heavier stuff. Sort of a delicate approach that really makes it more acoustic-like, even with amps turned up all the way. But as soon as you dig into it, it responds like you’d want it to. Being able to take that kind of approach, just based on dynamic range… you don’t see that in a lot of other guitars, period.”
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Chris: “When I first played with Jake, he was playing a Marshall-based amplifier and that SG, and I thought, ‘Well, what’s going on on the floor?’ And generally, at those early shows, it was like two Electro-Harmonix Holy Grails and an MXR Micro [Amp ] booster, the white pedal – maybe one or two of those. Then you had another pedal that you didn’t use [laughs]. That was the rig. And that was for playing shows to five-and-a-half thousand people three nights in a row, sold out.
“Having toured for the best part of 10 years up to that point, I’d never seen a guitar player really do that. The thing is, those iconoclastic players that Jake’s talking about… Jake was doing it, and he doesn’t appreciate how spectacularly special that is. That’s partly due to the amplifier, partly due to the player, partly to the guitar.”
Jake: “I think it was just really out of necessity at the time…”
Chris: “But still, Jake, your rig is essentially the same [laughs]. Every time you get something else out to play with, it’s like, ‘No, just amp and guitar.’”
Jake: “It’s interesting. When I had the opportunity to take an amp down and drive it more with a pedal, just for volume and things like that, or to get different preamp and drive sounds, I always prefer to take the pedal out and push the amp up more for some reason. For me, that always just sounds better. I don’t think that I would be a traditionalist or purist by some people’s standards, but I probably end up in that territory just based on the way I’ve approached guitar playing.”
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Jake, what does Mirador allow you to express, musically, that you can’t easily do within Greta Van Fleet?
We were coming from the same world because we grew up on blues music and folk music and cultural music and just scenes from all over the place
Jake Kizska
Jake: “You know, there are certain evolutions that Greta has taken. Some of our first or earlier records were maybe on the more primitive side, and maybe reflected more of a blues influence and some early traditional, folk elements that I really felt were worth exploring more. Perhaps we’re 1758275414 at an evolutionary state with our music that wouldn’t necessarily allow that exploration.
“We’ve gone in other directions already, and I have so many different ideas that just wouldn’t get past the filtration system of Sam [Kiszka, bass/keyboard], Josh [Kiszka, lead vocals], some other people in the band, you know… mainly Josh [laughs]. Again, that chemistry with those guys – and obviously being brothers with them – writing with them is different. So when I met Chris that was like finding another brother.
“We were coming from the same world because we grew up on blues music and folk music and cultural music and just scenes from all over the place. And, all of a sudden, it was gonna be possible to explore those territories again in this band, whereas we might have evolved past some of those possibilities in Greta.”
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Roving Blade, arguably one of the album’s defining songs, has an incredible solo that really leaps out at the listener. Tell us about tracking that.
Jake: “Yeah, that was loud, wasn’t it? I think there were certain expectations that with two guitar players coming together to do a record, the guitars were going to be loud! Which they definitely were on that solo in particular.
“The way we mixed it was not too dissimilar from the way that you’d mix a classic record. So we’d have the faders and we’d basically be [riding] the volume levels, playing it through, and that’s how it was mixed, very traditionally. When the solo for Roving Blade came up, the fader maybe got knocked a little too high by someone…”
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Chris: “I think we can quote Dave as saying, ‘I know it’s fucking stupid, but it’s cool.’ [Laughs]”
Jake: “Absolutely, it’s like – that’s really loud, but it works. Why not? It sounds good. It feels great. Leave it.”
Chris: “That was pretty much the second song we did. And I’m in full British-folky mode on position 4 on the Strat and it’s a Richard Thompson-esque situation. Then there’s the big Roving Blade solo moment, which is Jake.
“You tried to beat that solo, but that [solo that made it onto the record] was live in the take. So the vocals that you’re hearing everything, that’s essentially all live. Other than my slide guitar piece, which had to be cut separately – that solo is live. It’s just the real deal.”
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The Mirador record was very much made by tapping into the energy of musicians feeding off each other in a semi-live recording. Looking back at classic rock tracks made in a similar way in the ’60s, you can hear moments when the wheels leave the ground and the whole band starts flying – like just after the ‘Mr Mojo Rising’ section in LA Woman by The Doors. Were there any breakthrough moments like that when you were recording Mirador?
Chris: “Well, arrogantly I would say everything! [Laughs] But I think there was such an intensity with Dave – with how he recorded and how he was pushing us to track at the pace that we did. You could only move on a sort of visceral adrenaline. That was the only way you could cope.”
Jake: “I think the way we approached this record, in terms of tracking it, was such a fever-pitch thing. It was such a frantic approach that, in essence, there was not enough time to psychologically digest what was going on. We were acting purely on instinct. The scrutiny that we knew we’d be under lent itself to the atmosphere of the record. It was like everybody had their backs up against the wall, you know. So we really had to come out swinging.”
Chris: “The other moment I think of like that is with Raider – that’s the first song we tracked in all of those sessions, and it’s an ugly riff, you know? It’s heavy duty and the band is not perfectly together, and it’s heaving and it’s ugly.
“I just think that, for me, was another moment of just falling off the end of this arena tour for the first time – high intensity, where we were thrown in front of Greta’s audience.
“Our first show was in front of 12,000 people and there’s a lot to prove. Then here we were in this studio, late at night in Savannah, after probably too many tequilas. It was like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna lean into this. Here we go.’ And you can feel that energy. You can’t do that to a clicker.”
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That spontaneity and playing by instinct can really be heard on Ten Thousand Left To Ride.
Jake: “That was, honestly, one of my favourite guitar solo tones on the record. I was in the control room and that’s typically where I’ll take solos if I get the chance, if they’re not already baked into the track. It was really inspiring. And again, it just comes in loud as shit at the end. That was honestly another good example [of loud guitar parts working]: Dave, Chris and I were looking at each other because it really was too loud [laughs].
“I was laughing and having a childlike moment, really. I couldn’t stop from grinning, because it was so badass. I really loved how it sounded. I was really excited. And it was like, ‘This is the moment.’ Where you hear a guitar and it just makes your life, man.”
