Greta Van Fleet On Pissing People Off, The Politicians They Want To Do Acid With And More

Up and coming rock stars Greta Van Fleet are no strangers to controversy. The Michigan quartet was Grammy nominated in 2019 for Best New Artist and won Best Rock Album and praised by many for bringing rock back to the mainstream.

But of course for all of those who praised the band, there were those naysayers who criticized the band for being too derivative and sounding like Led Zeppelin, among others.

Now three years older, the four members of GVF — brothers Josh, Sam and Jake Kiszka and Daniel Wagner — are embracing the controversy. « I hope that this album pisses a lot of people off, » Josh says of the band’s eagerly awaited second full album, The Battle At Garden’s Gate.

It likely will, though that is on fans who want to hate. The superb album, referred to by some in early reviews as « prog » as in prog rock, finds the quartet evolving, melding their singer-songwriter influences, which are considerable, with their hard rock sound.

Just like any successful band, which GVF are, there are those who won’t be satisfied. And yet I’ve talked to fans in the industry who could not stop raving about the album.

That sort of mixed response is music to GVF’s collective ears, who want to shake things up. And say whatever you want, there is no denying the band are an absolute blast as an interview.

Over the course of a 45-minute Zoom call we veer on a wide variety of topics, including creating a game show, « When To Give A F**k Or Not, » and answering the question of which politician they’d most want to do acid with. This was a fun one.

Steve Baltin: What prompted the move to Nashville?

Sam Kiszka: Well, I suppose the life and death of country music.

Josh Kiszka: We needed to do something about that. I suppose we needed somewhere to hunker down in the pandemic country. And this made a lot of sense. We are in and out of Nashville all of the time. Just because so much industry is here. Our company is based out of Nashville, of course.

Sam: All of them.

Josh: All of our companies. They’re huge. Huge companies. It made sense. And I fear like hell domestication. I do not like the idea of being in one place. I’ve just been renting. I may buy a house but I just like the idea of being a troubadour.

Baltin: Then how have you handled the next year of not being able to be a troubadour?

Josh: I’ve been doing a lot of writing. I’m kinda just keeping busy writing and playing. I don’t know. Sort of building out album packaging and visual representations of that sonic aesthetic thing. You know, that kind of s**t.

Sam: Writing songs, making love, drinking wine.

Josh: Drinking wine, smoking a little grass.  

Sam: Going out to the pond.

Baltin: How much of this record was done before the pandemic started?

Sam: Most of it.

Josh: We started recording in the summer of 2019. And then we were pretty much finished by 2020. Trying to find the right amount of time to record in between vigorous touring, we were only going to have time to do about ten songs. And I guess some silver lining with 2020 is we had time to add an additional two songs to make 12. And I can’t imagine the album without them.

Sam: I think they were necessary additions.

Baltin: What were the last two additions?

Sam: « The Barbarians » and « Caravel. »

Baltin: When you guys go back and listen to it, do you feel a difference in those last two songs?  Did you feel that the newer songs felt more timely?

Sam: Perhaps, largely I think that they really blend in sonically with the other songs. It’s all in the same direction. However, I would say musically there’s kind of some interesting maturity to those two songs. Like in « Caravel, » the first half of the second chorus, gets taken over by strings. It all comes back in. And « The Barbarians » we kind of hold back more on the instrumentation rather than layering a thousand things in. And I think that’s a testament to where we’re going as a band.

Josh: But they did sound like the Garden’s Gate album. That was the beautiful thing, it was sort of like the cherry on top. It definitely fit the world of that album. But yeah, they do seem a little bit more contemporary. It’s just a strange album in the time everything was written in. Like « Heat Above » was written five years ago. We never put it on an album because we didn’t think it really suited the demeanor of those particular albums. But then there are tracks on this album that were written in the studio. And then you’ve got « Caravel » and « The Barbarians, » which were written last year. So it just seems like it’s spread over time, as far as everything was written.

Sam: I also think it all lives under the same idea because it is the same idea. We create the songs under the aesthetic and the feeling and the meaning of what the album is.

Baltin: We talked about your folk influences. Where people hear prog in this, I hear the melding of the hard rock and the folk. If you know you guys, you can feel the Dylan influences and some of that singer-songwriter stuff in the same way that you have hard rock bands that go in the direction of the more acoustic stuff.

Sam: That’s pretty profound. I don’t think anybody’s put it quite like that. But yeah, I always had a difficulty seeing prog in what we’re doing.

Josh: I think that’s a great perspective that you have. I think that you’re probably, certainly onto something. I would agree with that.

Baltin: When you go back and listen to it, do you hear more of those singer songwriter type of influences that we talked about last time?

Josh: Yes, absolutely. That’s like DNA.

Sam: Yeah, and I think it came from a lack of stimulation. We kind of got bored with the simplicity of a lot of contemporary rock music. That’s not really, truly what we are. We’re definitely a rock and roll band, but The Battle At Garden’s Gate really delves more into the song realm.

Josh: Those aren’t traditional arrangements by any means. And there’s of course no real format. There’s not a format so that’s kind of the thing. I guess we know all of that music. We know what those rules were. And I think we’re pretty comfortable breaking all of those rules.

Baltin: When you think of the Doors influence, what are the favorite couple of Doors songs?

Josh: « Unknown Soldier » I think is my favorite right now. That one is really grand.

Sam: For me, I think their live stuff is my favorite. It’s so wicked and f**king wild. My favorite stuff is the really dark stuff, like « Riders On The Storm. »

Josh: Even « The End » has this really wonderful, euphoric sort of psychedelic…

Sam: It actually has a similar feeling to what the Garden’s Gate is.

Baltin: When you do a record like this, talk about those influences that come in from – not necessarily similar in sound – but pushing boundaries.

Sam: Yeah, we’ve always loved the people that push the boundaries because, I don’t know, you get bored with what exists. That’s the entire purpose of the art in the first place.

Josh: And I think that there’s a reminder that there’s something that’s a bit like a lightning rod going on when you’ve got controversy. And I know we’ve seen plenty of it. And I hope that this album pisses a lot of people off. But I think that’s generally what the response seems to be, “They can’t be doing this s**t.”

Baltin: Was there something that set the sound or tone of the record early on?

Josh: We gave ourselves a bit of context. It wasn’t like “Let’s set out to make an album like this or like that.” We wanted to fill a void. It was something we wanted to do for a while. The natural inclination of the artist is to provide what the universe does no. It’s like, « We want to hear this, I would love for this to be an album. » And the idea is just to make something more cinematic and on a bigger scope. I, of course, am very reliant on good songwriting. I really lean heavy on that. I love good melody. I love a strong vocal. That’s where I’m coming from. It’s not an ambient f**ing album. Nor is it an escapist album. It’s function isn’t to tune in, drop out but more to challenge you a little bit. I mean, yes there is a little bit of elements of those but it should be a bit challenging.

Sam: It’s not a record you can put on casually, when you’re trying to relax or something. It’s something you actually have to turn on to listen to. You have to become present. And I love things like that. I love to be stimulated in a way that you can turn on. Because I think a lot of the time as humans, we spend most of our life kind of in auto-pilot. It’s like we’re robots most of the time until something comes along that’s intriguing enough to smack you in the face.

Baltin: When you go back and listen to this all the way through are there things that surprise you? Does it surprise you how much continuity there is throughout the 12 songs?

Sam: It’s very cohesive, somehow.

Josh: I think as far as the songwriting is concerned, each song is very different from the last. But the way that production sounds, and the way that the performances translate, they all seem very contemporary and they all seem they fit in one moment in time and it does sound like a materialized album. So I think that says something about music transforming through time. I think if we were to play those songs three years ago they would’ve sounded very different. But I think the fact that they all came together in a fairly short period of time as far as recording is concerned, I think it really does sounds like one body of work.

Baltin: When you go back and hear it then, is there a through line through the record?

Josh: Thematically I see war as being really a prevalent theme. And yeah  I suppose sonically it really is the way we approached recording the specific instruments. And obviously there’s slight variations and slightly different from track to track. But those are all live performances in one space.

Sam: Yeah, I think we also pushed the technology that’s available right now to its absolute limit. And we combined things that were created in maybe the ’20s and ’30s. And we used things that were from 2020. We used the whole spectrum of technology, which we had a lot of fun with.

Josh: Which I think translates really well and is really appropriate for this album because there are those ancient themes and then there are very, very contemporary modern themes as well.

Baltin: Now that we’re reaching the point where we’re going to have more live music again soon, because it is such a cohesive record, and as you say it’s meant to be challenging and listened to all the way through, any chance you would do the record start to finish?

Josh: Oh, much talks.

Sam: Yes, it’s in the works. Because that’s kind of the way that it has to live. It would be doing it kind of an injustice, if not.

Josh: And it’s like when you play to a live audience it’s gonna be so many tracks that they’re gonna wanna hear and there’s so many tracks that you have time to play, really. And so I think that’s always gonna be a sort of amalgamation of different tracks. But when it comes to an album you could play it live to an audience, but you can’t be doing that every night. That’s not really how we work, we like to keep things shifting. So I think recording it as a live album film is important because I think it’ll help solidify that in a moment in time or encapsulate it. And force people to see the thing from beginning to end, start to finish.

Sam: And also be able to stylize it much more heavily than we would be able to do in a real live setting.

Josh: Right, it’s something more artistic. Like a high art kind of thing.

Sam: Also it’s going to be really interesting to see how – and this is the first time I’ve thought about this –  the Garden’s Gate songs and the Anthem Of The Peaceful Army songs and everything. I think that’s going to be the most fun, blending those songs and going from one to the other. Or taking two parts of two songs and interconnecting them. There’s a very big wealth of opportunity.

Josh: One hundred percent. It’s all kind of swimming in this fishbowl. And the Battle At Garden’s Gate is really an extension of Anthem Of The Peaceful Army. I think it exists in the same sort of parallel universe. That gives us the platform to be able to communicate these ideas through symbology and talk in metaphors and analogies, cover all these archetypes and human themes. So I think that they kind of dance together. I always see all of the Greta Van Fleet stuff to me, there are show posters they paste up on the street, and they keep pasting over them. And over time they just get pulled back and you’ve just got this collage of time and colors and it’s really interesting.

Baltin: When you think of putting this to the stage, are there live shows that inspire you in terms of the way you watch artists evolve?

Sam: Yeah, Florence and the Machine that’s a pretty f**king good show.

Josh: I’d say spectacular show. And we’ve kind of run into them a couple of times. Sharing some stages over some touring years in and out. We’ve watched their show a few times, it’s a really great rock and roll band, great rock and roll concert performance. I always have to go back to the way James Brown or Elvis Presley would have held themselves. Even Aretha Franklin. There’s such a presence to them. And Elvis could just sort of stand there and just be very casual and very cool. And James Brown was so acrobatic. And such a showman. And Aretha, that’s another thing, she had almost the thing Beyonce might even have, which is just this really beautiful women power. Just standing up there blowing the f**king roof off the place. And she’s just really very passionate. That’s pretty incredible. But again she could just hold herself very causal. But the thing that Florence Welch does is almost fairylike. Just throws herself into the audience a bit.

Baltin: In terms of pissing a lot of people off, so far what song on this record has pissed people off the most?

Sam: I hope « Heat Above. » And it sounds funny but one of our kind of underlying goals as a band is to change the way music is given to people. Because we know that there’s a select few of industry goons that sit on top of a high tower and tell people what to listen to. But putting out a song like « Heat Above » as a radio single really shakes up the game. And it really kind of messes with what everybody thinks.

Baltin: Do you feel like you guys are enjoying it more right now?

Josh: I think enjoying it perhaps in a different way. I think it’s fair to say that you continue to care less about the unimportant bulls**t as you get older. I think so. I think you get a little bit better adjusted.

Sam: When to give a f**k and when to not.

Baltin: When there is the Greta Van Fleet memoir I think it needs to be titled When to Give a F**k, When Not to Give a F**k.

Sam: You have to help write it too.

Baltin: In the short summation give me one example of each. One moment when to give a f**k, one moment when not to give a f**k.

Sam: When to give a f**k. In the studio, when there’s a disagreement, whether it be a songwriting disagreement, some kind of issue in that realm. I think it’s important to find common ground and to reach a conclusion.

Josh: So that would be a Give a F**k. Ding! Now when a label goon comes to listen to the album and give you pointers, and then compare it directly to Pink Floyd, you don’t give a f**k.

Baltin: Are we ever going to see a movie version of The Battle of Garden’s Gate?

Josh: I think maybe one day you could look forward to seeing a film adaptation of the world of the discography of Greta van Fleet where some of the tracks are interpreted in a more classical sense. And you’d have characters and themes from that world. Think Terry Gilliam almost.

Baltin: What do you want people to take from this record?

Sam: It’s a new world out there!

Josh: It’s a brave new world, step into it. We’re breaking down the walls, lean into it hard. Tear down the walls, tear down the motherf**ker. That Jefferson Airplane track. Jefferson Airplane is one of my all time favorite bands. Hands down. No question on that.

Baltin: Grace Slick remains one of the all-time icons. There is the famous story of her sneaking acid into the White House to slip acid to Richard Nixon. Never asked this question of anybody before, but if you could drop acid with one politician, who would it be?

Sam: Barack Obama.

Josh: I think Bernie Sanders would be an absolute blast. Yes, I identify a bit with his rhetoric. I think there’s something that would be entertaining.