Mirador
Two guitar gods are better than one. Or at least that’s the case with prog-rock outfit Mirador, who will release their eponymous debut on Friday. Greta Van Fleet guitarist Jake Kiszka and Ida Mae axeman Chris Turpin first met when their groups were paired on a tour in 2019. Kiszka and Turpin had an instant rapport and grew to be close friends.
“I’ve seen many, many guitar players, and the way Chris plays is very unique and unlike any of them,” Kiszka says. “We eventually spent what time we could on that tour, playing a lot of guitar late nights on the bus, jamming around, drinking red wine, you know, and sort of howling at the moon.”
Those late nights on the bus led to Kiszka guesting on Ida Mae’s 2021 album Click Click Domino. After that, the pair decided to do some co-writing.
“Jake said, ‘Do you want to come over and do something?’” Turpin recalls. “And I said, ‘If we do something, I think it’s going to be a little serious, and we should lean into it.’”
Over a three-day period at Kiszka’s home in East Nashville, they wrote seven songs, six of which appear on their new album, including “Feels Like Gold,” “Raider,” “Ten Thousand More to Ride” and “Skyway Drifter.” After a second co-writing session, they had all but one of the record’s 12 songs. As the aforementioned titles suggest, lyrically the songs have a timeless quality, full of images of nature and only a few references that specifically could be considered modern. Turpin describes the lyrics as “folkloric.”
“We were tracing back early roots,” he says. “We were like, ‘How much further can we go back? What can we pull from the world that hasn’t been done in rock ’n’ roll so recently?’ And that’s where you go back to the early ballads and the European folk stuff. I think both of us wanted to write a record that had some form of deeper meaning.”
With the material in hand, they turned their attention to filling out the group.
“Jake was quite keen on getting a British band together, and I loved that idea,” U.K. native Turpin says.
They enlisted bassist-keyboardist Nick Pini, who had appeared on several Ida Mae albums, and drummer Mikey Sorbello, best known as a member of British blues-rock duo The Graveltones. The four musicians got together for the first time at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in summer 2023.
“We set up and started jamming just to see what would happen,” Kiszka recalls. “When we stopped playing, the place was just humming, and it was like, ‘This is absolutely going to work.’”
The quartet spent a month road-testing the material as the opening act at the end of Greta Van Fleet’s Starcatcher World Tour, at which point they were ready to go into the studio and make a record. While both Kiszka and Turpin had experience producing, they decided they needed another perspective and chose Dave Cobb to helm the sessions.
“I think there’s probably a handful of guys on the planet today who can really record a serious rock ’n’ roll record, and Dave Cobb being one of them,” Kiszka explains.
Kiszka and Turpin shared both the lead vocals and the guitar solos on the sessions at RCA Studio B in Nashville. Cobb made the guitars loud in the mix, but that’s not to suggest the arrangements are not dynamic, even beautiful in places. The guitarists also break out their acoustics for some intricate interplay on a few tracks, most notably on “Fortune’s Fate” and the finale, “Hymnal I.”
As for the band’s name, it was the result of a happy accident. In a text exchange, Kiszka suggested “Marauder,” but misspelled the word as “Mirador.” Before he could correct it, Turpin said he loved the word “mirador,” which is a tower of sorts that offers a good view of a broad range of territory. It seemed appropriate, so it stuck.
“We thought, ‘Fuck, it would look good on a T-shirt,’” Turpin says with a laugh.
