Greta Van Fleet guitarist Jake Kiszka and Ida Mae's Chris Turpin met in 2018 when Ida Mae were supporting Greta Van Fleet's tour. The two quickly found that they had a mutual fascination for early blues, ancient ballads, and raw storytelling, which led to sharing late night exchanges of guitars, blues lines, and old folk songs. Years later they reconnected and a deeper creative friendship formed as they both felt pulled toward a project that would let them explore music traditions they each carried, leading to the choice to write together with no expectations of where it would take them.
Writing began in Kiszka’s Victorian house in East Nashville with two acoustic guitars, a notebook, and a week of uninterrupted focus. The two have said that songs appeared quickly, often two or three a day, creating a momentum neither tried to control. Turpin drew from old ballad books and early folk phrasing, lifting fragments like Must I Go Bound and reshaping them around new melodic forms. Kiszka brought his instinct for riffs, electric phrasing, and harmonies that shifted between direct lines and counter melodies. Themes of fate, wandering figures, and personal search emerged through their writing process and Mirador was born. Things turned louder once Mirador became a full band with the addition of drummer Mikey Sorbello and bassist Nick Pini.
Recording sessions began at Real World Studios, then moved to producer Dave Cobb’s Savannah studio, where he set them up in a room and asked them to play live with no click track, letting instinct drive their sessions. What Cobb and the band were able to capture is simply thrilling. Kiszka and Turpin swap vocals and guitar lines with an easy fluency, while Sorbello's drumming and Pini's bass are locked in around them. Heavy tracks like Raider and Blood And Custard take on a rough edge driven by volume, while pieces like Skyway Drifter and Fortune’s Fate carry the acoustic and folkloric roots of their early writing periods. Folklore, destiny, and inherited language anchor the record, with storytelling lifted from centuries old ballads and woven into new structures.
Turpin has described how Cobb pushed the band to track at a fast pace, forcing the band to move with visceral adrenaline, and you can sense it in these live recordings. From the opening with Feels Like Gold, the band comes out swinging. Even more so, the band's sound feels fully baked. I honestly felt like I was listening to a band that had been together for years, just in the wrong decade. Channeling the spirit of early 1970's Brit rock, this album has nostalgia written all over it and pays homage to a golden period of rock and roll. It's simply a fantastic album.
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