Highway Tune

Album: Black Smoke Rising (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • Greta Van Fleet is four-piece rock band formed in 2012, who hail from Frankenmuth, Michigan. They are named after a woman from Frankenmuth named Gretna Van Fleet and the name is used with her blessing. The group consists of three brothers - singer Josh, guitarist Jake and bassist Sam Kiszka plus their drummer friend from school, Danny Wagner, who joined them a year later.
  • This song was released on March 31, 2017 as the band's first single of their debut EP Black Smoke Rising. Its guitar riff was first created by Jake Kiszka back in 2010. He recalled to Limewire in 2017:

    "I had just started writing songs and music and started building how I would structure songs. That was one of the first riffs that I'd ever written. I took one of my dad's harmonica amps and plugged in a Gibson SG to it and I sat down and work that out. After five minutes, it came and I was like 'Okay, well that's a riff then.' (laughs).

    That's going to be the base of the song. So I'd written that riff about seven years ago approximately and then I've brought it to the table five years ago with that first line-up and then with Danny in the band we formatted it, we recorded it and we've demoed it and we demoed it again at Rust Belt Studios and recorded it there and then that would be the final product. So it's gone through a journey, that song."
  • The song climbed all the way to #1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Songs airplay chart dated September 16, 2017.
  • This was nominated for the Best Rock Performance Grammy, but lost to Chris Cornell's "When Bad Does Good." Greta Van Fleet did take Best Rock Album for From The Fires.

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