GRETA VAN FLEET TRIVIA
Trivia
Their Japanese debut was meant to be SUMMER SONIC 2018 that August, but they pulled out, citing an unforeseen scheduling problem on the band's side. The first Japanese shows came in January 2019: Zepp Osaka Bayside on the 22nd (moved from the 21st), then Zepp Divercity Tokyo on the 24th and Shinkiba STUDIO COAST on the 25th. According to the live report published by Universal Music, their Japanese label, Josh walked on carrying a bouquet of white roses and threw the flowers into the crowd, and the set, which opened with "Highway Tune", ran to ten songs and about eighty minutes, Howlin' Wolf's "Evil" among them. Three days before the Osaka show, on 19 January, they had made their first appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Their records reached Japan in stages. Black Smoke Rising, the debut EP released digitally in April 2017, arrived in Japan as an imported CD that September and was picked for Tower Records Japan's staff recommendations in the international section for November 2017; the double EP From the Fires was picked as well. Their Japanese debut proper was Anthem of the Peaceful Army, released on 19 October 2018, whose Japanese edition added all four songs of Black Smoke Rising as bonus tracks. From the Fires, the Grammy winner, had no Japanese edition until 7 August 2024, when it was finally issued in Japan on SHM-CD.
Their second visit to Japan came some five and a half years after the first, at SUMMER SONIC 2024, where they were touring Starcatcher. They played the festival's AIR STAGE in Osaka on 17 August and its MARINE STAGE at ZOZO Marine Stadium in Chiba on the 18th. Universal Music, their Japanese label, marked the visit by announcing an hour-long YouTube special of live footage and music videos for 16 August.
Interviewed by BARKS partway through that first Japanese tour, Sam said Japanese audiences listened with real respect and attention, and joked that above all their sense of rhythm was superb: the clapping never drifted off the beat, which would not happen in America. Jake had been told beforehand that Japanese crowds concentrate so hard on the music that they sometimes fall completely silent; he found that to be true, but saw them jumping around and having fun as well. Talking to Gekirock in 2021, he recalled the view of Mount Fuji from the bullet train between Tokyo and Osaka, but said what stayed with him most was how respectfully the fans responded to the songs.
Drummer Danny Wagner joined about a year after the band first formed. Jake remembers inviting him over to jam and finding that he could already play every riff Jake had written, which Jake could only put down to Danny having been at all their shows; once the four of them were together, he says, it felt like the moment to get serious. Danny has said he took up the drums because a cousin who was moving away left a kit behind. According to Universal Music Japan's profile, it was in high school that he realised he had perfect pitch. The same profile says he identified with Ringo Starr, the newcomer joining three players who already knew each other inside out, and for a long time treated his place in the band as a never-ending audition.
In 2014, with all four members still in high school, their original song "Standing On" was used in a commercial for the 2014 Chevy Equinox from the Metro Detroit Chevy Dealers. The dealers' own site profiled the band that March, pointing out that the members were aged 14 to 17, too young even to buy a lottery ticket. In the same piece the band explained how a song came together: Jake brings in a riff that sets its tone and attitude, the rhythm section of Danny and Sam builds it out, and Josh adds the lyrics and the vocal phrasing last.
"Highway Tune" held No. 1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Songs chart for five weeks. Canada went further: by March 2018 "Highway Tune" had spent nine straight weeks at the top of the Active Rock radio chart, and its follow-up "Safari Song" twelve. According to Universal Music Japan, no artist before them had seen its first two singles each stay at No. 1 for nine weeks or more on a Canadian radio chart of any format. In the US the No. 1s kept coming on both the Mainstream Rock and Active Rock charts, and "My Way, Soon", released in 2020, became their fifth in January 2021.
At the 61st Grammy Awards in 2019 they were nominated in four categories, Best New Artist, Best Rock Performance for "Highway Tune", Best Rock Song for "Black Smoke Rising" and Best Rock Album for From the Fires, and won the last of them against records by Alice In Chains, Fall Out Boy, Ghost and Weezer. Best Rock Song is a songwriters' award, and the nomination lists all four members by their full names. The producer credit on From the Fires names Herschel Boone alongside Al Sutton and Marlon Young. Their third album, Starcatcher, was nominated for Best Rock Album at the 66th Grammys in 2024, a year Paramore took the award.
In December 2018, with four Grammy nominations just announced, the band thanked its fans by pledging a dollar from every ticket for its three sold-out homecoming shows in Detroit at the end of the month to the Children's Hospital of Michigan Foundation. The gift was made in the name of the Peaceful Army, as their fans are known. The shows were at the Fox Theatre, where the 27 and 29 December dates had sold out within minutes of going on sale on 14 September, prompting a third night on the 30th.
By the time of their second album, The Battle at Garden's Gate (2021), the four had moved from Michigan to Nashville; the record itself was made in Los Angeles with producer Greg Kurstin. Jake told Gekirock that they had set out to make cinematic rock and roll, and that of the producers they considered, Kurstin seemed the most interested. According to the band's own track notes, "Light My Love" was the first song they cut, as a test of how they worked with him, and it convinced them. Most of the album was finished before lockdown; "Caravel" and "The Barbarians", written during the pandemic, were the last two songs added.
Their third album, Starcatcher (2023), was made by the band with producer Dave Cobb and recorded at the RCA studio in Nashville. Their Japanese label described it as packed with the raw energy of their live shows and as exploring the contrasts between fantasy and reality, light and dark. While they were making it, Sam spoke of taking their heads back to the days in the garage, capturing what was happening in the room and making it raw rather than spending all their time making it perfect. It entered Billboard's Top Rock & Alternative Albums chart at No. 1, their third album in a row to top it.
The band is named after Gretna Van Fleet, a longtime resident of the members' hometown of Frankenmuth. It began with a remark by the grandfather of their original drummer, Kyle Hauck, who mentioned that he had to go and cut wood for Gretna Van Fleet; the name stuck, and the "n" was dropped because Greta was easier to say. Talking to Billboard in 2018, she said she had laughed the idea off and assumed a name like that would never last. She had played saxophone and piano in a dance band with her three brothers in the late 1950s, and after seeing the band at the Fillmore Detroit that May she said it was not really her kind of music, but the boys had done a good job of it. Their debut album was released on 19 October 2018, her 88th birthday. Gretna Van Fleet died in May 2026, aged 95.
The band began in a garage in Jake Kiszka's sophomore year of high school. Jake, who was playing in the school jazz band at the time, recalls asking his friend Kyle to drum with him; before long Josh was coming out to sing and Sam to play bass. By the summer of 2012, according to the Detroit Free Press, the three brothers and Kyle Hauck were a nameless amateur outfit working up songs by the likes of Led Zeppelin and Ozzy Osbourne. Their first real booking, a slot on Main Street at Frankenmuth's annual Auto Fest, was what finally made them realise they needed a name.
The riff behind "Highway Tune", their debut single, is older than the band. Speaking in 2017, Jake Kiszka dated it six or seven years back, to when he had only just started writing songs, and called it one of the first riffs he ever came up with: he plugged a Gibson SG into one of his father's harmonica amps, sat down and had it within about five minutes. He brought it to the first line-up around five years before that interview; once Danny had joined, they built it into a song, demoed it more than once and cut the finished version at Rust Belt Studios.
They signed to Lava Records in March 2017. Jake has said the plan had been to build the band from the ground up without a label, so when management called to say that Jason Flom and Lava/Republic wanted to sign them, they simply did not believe it. There was no trip to New York to seal the deal: a FaceTime call with Flom was enough. Billboard reported that Flom, Lava's CEO, signed them on the spot, and a month later their debut EP, Black Smoke Rising, was on the Billboard 200.
The title and cover of From the Fires, the eight-song double EP of November 2017, come from Josh Kiszka's childhood. As he tells it, their extended families and friends spent part of every summer at a place in the woods called Yankee Springs, where every night they sat around a campfire playing music and telling stories. It reminded him of ancient peoples gathered at the fire while their elders passed down fables of wisdom and courage, and that idea gave the record both its name and its artwork. It pairs the four songs of the debut EP Black Smoke Rising with four recordings made at Rust Belt Studios in September 2017: two originals and a cover each of Sam Cooke and Fairport Convention.
In late March 2018, after a year in which the Led Zeppelin comparisons had followed them everywhere, Robert Plant weighed in himself. According to the Detroit Free Press, asked in an interview about young bands he liked, Plant named them straight away and said: "They are Led Zeppelin I." He called Josh a beautiful little singer, added in mock indignation that he hated him, and joked that the voice had been borrowed from somebody he knew very well. Josh, for his part, told Rolling Stone that he had not known who Led Zeppelin were until high school, and that his high wail first came out at a rehearsal when he was straining to be heard over the band.
On 4 March 2018 they played Elton John's annual Academy Awards party for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Jake has said the invitation came from Elton personally; Elton introduced them to the Hollywood guests as one of the biggest new bands of the year and then joined them for his own "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" and their "You're the One". In October that year Jake told Loudwire that Elton, after watching one of their London shows, went through the set with them and suggested stretching out the opening of "Highway Tune" to make it more dramatic. His other advice was to flaunt what they had, which is why Jake stopped wearing an undershirt on stage.
Asked by the Japanese site BARKS what the peaceful army of Anthem of the Peaceful Army meant, Josh said it was not the band but everyone, since all people are connected, and that an anthem here meant a song for peace and harmony. Jake traced the idea to their shows, where he had watched people of every generation and background come together; the band is part of that army, he said, and so is the audience. The closing song, "Anthem", began as a poem that came to Josh at about five in the morning, half-asleep, and that he wrote down on the spot.
Sam told BARKS that they had gone in meaning to use songs written on the road over the previous three or four years, but in the studio those songs sounded less good than they had hoped. So they began writing afresh, salvaging pieces of older material, and after setting the project aside for about a month they wrote everything and recorded nearly all of it within two weeks; Jake reckoned about half the album was written after recording began. The producers were the three who had made both EPs, Al Sutton, Marlon Young and Herschel Boone, and Billboard reported that the sessions took place at Rust Belt Studios outside Detroit and Blackbird Studios in Nashville.
The band had been off the stage since a set at the Soundside Music Festival in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in September 2024. In early May 2026 a montage of their music videos signed off with "Thanks for the wild ride" set off talk of a split, but on 8 May they posted a minute-long clip of themselves playing an unreleased song in the studio with the words "We're back, baby!" The comeback show came on 27 May at New York's Bowery Ballroom, a 575-capacity club, with tickets sold only in person at the box office the day before, for $20 including fees; videos showed band members turning up to sell tickets to fans in the queue themselves. By Consequence's count it was 605 days since their previous show and 3,095 days since they had last played that room.
The new album, Palace for the People, due on 9 October 2026, takes its title from London's Alexandra Palace. According to the announcement, when they headlined the venue on their 2022 world tour a friend told them that the ornate Victorian building had originally been named the Palace of the People and was built not for monarchs or wealthy aristocrats but as a gathering place for the public. Sam has said that people keep telling the band they met their best friend through its music or at one of its shows, and that this is how they realised the music itself is their palace. The album was recorded in Tennessee in the spring of 2026 and co-produced by the band with Mike Elizondo; the Japanese edition, on SHM-CD, follows on 14 October.