Greta Van Fleet – Highway Tune

Jake Kiszka Wrote the Riff at Fourteen — Two Years Before the Band Existed. They Demoed It Twice, Recorded It Once More, Placed It on a Showtime Drama Before Anyone Had Heard Their Name. Then It Went to Number One.

The guitar riff at the heart of “Highway Tune” predates the band that recorded it. Jake Kiszka was around fourteen years old when he first put it together — somewhere around 2010 in Frankenmuth, Michigan, the small town of five thousand people north of Detroit that the Kiszka family called home. He was experimenting with a Gibson SG through a harmonica amp, building his first ideas about how songs might be structured, and the riff came out. He held onto it. Two years later, when he and his twin brother Josh and younger brother Sam formed a band in the family garage — eventually joined by their friend Danny Wagner on drums — the riff came with him to early writing sessions. It was demoed at Metro 37 Studios. Then it was demoed again. Then, in its final form, it was recorded at Rust Belt Studios. By the time the finished version of “Highway Tune” was released as Greta Van Fleet’s debut single on March 31, 2017, the riff had been living in Jake Kiszka’s head for seven years, through three different lineups and two recording attempts. He was still twenty years old when the world heard it for the first time.

Greta Van Fleet — named, with a slight variation in spelling, after Gretna Van Fleet, an actual resident of Frankenmuth who gave the band her blessing — had been playing together since 2012. Their background was not in contemporary rock radio but in the records their parents had in the house: vinyl, classic rock, blues, folk, a range of influences that fed into the four young men’s playing from the ground up. Jake’s guitar touchstones included John Lee Hooker, Elmore James, Bert Jansch, Eric Clapton, and Keith Richards. Danny Wagner’s drumming heroes were Carmine Appice, John Bonham, Mitch Mitchell, and Michael Shrieve. Sam Kiszka’s favourite bass player was James Jamerson, the Motown session titan whose work underpinned an enormous proportion of popular music from the 1960s onward. Josh Kiszka’s voice, which would become the flashpoint for nearly every conversation about the band once “Highway Tune” reached the charts, developed organically out of the need to be heard over the rest of the band: he pushed it until it carried, and what came out was what it was. He later said he did not even know who Led Zeppelin were until high school, by which point his vocal approach was already formed. The comparison, once the record was out, was inevitable anyway.

The Song That Appeared Before It Was a Single

Before “Highway Tune” was officially released, it appeared on the Showtime drama Shameless in January 2016, performed live by the band in the show’s fifteenth episode of the sixth season. It was an early placement for a band without a record deal, a moment of visibility in a landscape where such things matter far more than they once did. The song sat with the show’s aesthetic — raw, working-class, American, slightly rough around the edges — in a way that suggested whoever was choosing music for Shameless was paying attention. The following year, Greta Van Fleet signed to Lava Records in March 2017. The final studio version of “Highway Tune” went to iTunes on March 31. Three weeks later, the debut EP Black Smoke Rising was released. By September 2017, the single had climbed to number one on the Billboard Mainstream Rock and Active Rock charts simultaneously, holding the top position for four consecutive weeks. The Canadian Active Rock chart followed. Rolling Stone, reviewing the track, described it as a “ferocious bit of slashing rock driven by singer Josh Kiszka’s Robert Plant wail” and declared that the song was “robust proof that classic rock lives.”

The Led Zeppelin comparison was everywhere from the moment the song broke. Robert Plant himself weighed in during a March 2018 interview, saying “they are Led Zeppelin I” and calling Josh “a beautiful little singer.” The response from the band was measured but consistent: Josh acknowledged Plant’s influence while noting he hadn’t set out to replicate it. Jake described spending a year intensely studying what Jimmy Page did until he understood how Page thought, while also citing blues players who predated Zeppelin as equal or greater influences. What the debate tended to obscure was the straightforward fact of what “Highway Tune” achieved: it was a debut single, recorded at a regional studio in Michigan by four young musicians still in their teens and early twenties, that reached the top of rock radio’s most significant airplay charts and held them for a month. Whatever one thought about the genealogy of the riff, the execution was undeniable.

The Grammy That Followed the Riff Across Seven Years

In December 2018, the Recording Academy nominated Greta Van Fleet for four Grammy Awards: Best New Artist, Best Rock Performance for “Highway Tune,” Best Rock Song for “Black Smoke Rising,” and Best Rock Album for From the Fires — the double EP released in November 2017 that combined the four songs from Black Smoke Rising with four new tracks. “Highway Tune” lost the performance category to Chris Cornell’s posthumous “When Bad Does Good,” but From the Fires won Best Rock Album, making Greta Van Fleet one of the most decorated debut acts in the category’s recent history. For Jake Kiszka, the journey from a teenage experiment on a Gibson SG through a harmonica amp in 2010 to a Grammy on a shelf in 2019 spanned roughly the same number of years as some bands’ entire careers. The riff had waited patiently through two demos, a regional television placement, and a record deal. It knew what it was from the beginning. The charts eventually agreed.