With eyes closed, you’d swear there are four musicians up there. At least.

Crown Lands makes music that’s mighty, magical and vast, especially impressive since there are only two people in the band. So how do these young rockers achieve such widescreen sonics onstage, on songs like “Right Way Back” and “The Witching Hour (Electric Witch)”?

For one, sheer musical prowess. Crown Lands singer/drummer Cody Bowles commands cirrus-scaling pipes and hot beats. Meanwhile, Kevin Comeau conjures guitar storms, silky synths and contoured bass, often within the same tune.

“One of our favorite bands is Rush,” Comeau says, “and they always joke about being the world’s smallest symphony. And we kind of wanted to one-up, or one-down them, and see how lush, orchestral and symphonic we could get with our rock sound.”

Standout Crown Lands single “Context: Fearless Pt. I” – not to mention the “2112″-esque title – certainly echoes Rush. The version on 2021 live-in-the-studio album “Odyssey Vol. 1″ is particularly stunning.

In addition to algebraic pow, Rush and Crown Lands share the same homeland, Canada. The latter hailing from Oshawa, Ontario, while the former formed in late ‘60s Toronto.

The saying goes “never meet your heroes.” But Bowles and Comeau have become friends with bassist/singer Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson, Rush’s surviving members after drummer/lyricist Neil Peart’s 2020 death at age 67 from brain cancer.

“Who you are as a person and how you treat people is just as important as what you create, and those guys walk through life so humbly,” Bowles says of Lifeson and Lee. “They’re still best buds after being on the road together for 40 years. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time on a tour, but that’s an amazing feat.”

Crown Lands served as Lifeson’s backing band at a 2021 charity gig. Leading up, Lifeson loaned Comeau his iconic white Gibson double-neck to take home. “I played (Rush classic) ‘Xanadu’ every night,” Comeau recalls. “He’s such a generous human being.” Lifeson also let Comeau play the Gibson, seen on many classic Rush photos, onstage during their charity show.

Then leading up to this year’s all-star tribute concerts for late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, Comeau hung out at Rush’s rehearsals with Dave Grohl. He even programmed Lee’s synthesizers for the shows.

Crown Lands can give those Rush dudes a run for their money in niceness. During my recent phone interview with Crown Lands, after one question Bowles and Comeau start to reply at the same time. This initiates several polite you-go-ahead’s back-and-forth between the bandmates. Eventually, Bowles jokingly calls it as a “Canadian standoff.”

The nine-song “Odyssey Vol. 1″ LP, which was also filmed and livestreamed, is the ideal entry point into Crown Land’s progressive hard-rock. Similar to 1971 classic what “At Fillmore East” did with southern-rock greats the Allman Brothers, “Odyssey” presents songs from Crown Lands’ first three studio albums with that extra heat of a live performance and captured with crystal clarity.

Comeau says “The Oracle,” an epic from 2021 EP “White Buffalo” and also the closing performance on “Odyssey: Vol. 1,” is the most challenging song for Crown Lands to pull off onstage.

“It’s really easy to play the loud heavy stuff live,” Comeau says, referring to earlier tracks like the slide-driven “Mountain.” “When you go into the dynamics though, the less people you have in a band, the louder each member has to be. Five- or six-piece bands, there’s not as much pressure on them. Whereas ‘The Oracle’ being such a dynamic moving piece of music — I mean, it’s like 15 minutes of time signatures and ridiculous key changes — it keeps you on your toes.”

The title track from “White Buffalo” is a concise rocker likely to appeal to fans of famous bluesier rock duos like the Black Keys and White Stripes. But unlike those aforementioned two bands with guitar-playing frontmen, since Bowles is a singing drummer, it gives Crown Lands a different groove.

Bowles says, “I feel like, having to play drums at the same time as singing, you intimately know all of the rhythms, accents and hits, so you unconsciously start making vocal riffs and hooks around those beats, so it does inform how the melodies are created.” Bowles credits “White Buffalo” producer David Bottrill, who previously worked with Tool and Peter Gabriel, with helping him expand his vocal phrasing.

Inside the boogie of “White Buffalo,” there’s a lyrical message close to Crown Lands’ heart. “In many Indigenous cultures, the white buffalo symbolizes strength and prosperity,” explains Bowles, who is half Mi’kmaw, an Indigenous tribe from Nova Scotia. “We had this song that had this really awesome driving beat. It felt like this unstoppable pulse.” To the band, this beat evoked a wild animal. “Thinking about that,” Bowles adds, “and having Indigenous ancestry, we were like, OK, we want to talk about ushering in a new age we hope to see for Indigenous people, and that’s coming together and overcoming the oppression of everything that has been pushed on our plates the last couple hundred years.”

Many bands end up resenting their breakthrough track. But Comeau thinks that won’t be the case with Crown Lands and “White Buffalo”: “The fact that seems to be our most popular song with radio and streaming, I think we’re pretty lucky, since the meaning is so near and dear to us. I’m really proud of that one.”

The plight of Indigenous people is a recurring theme with Crown Lands. Another essential track, “End of the Road,” off the band’s 2020 self-titled debut LP (helmed by Jason Isbell producer Dave Cobb), is dedicated to missing and murdered Indigenous women. The band’s name subverts the history of crown land taken from Indigenous people in Canada.

To make outsized music, in addition to chops, Crown Lands depends on “lots of toys” as Comeau puts it. Bowles plays a massive drumkit that extends to concert toms, windchimes, temple blocks and tubular bells. Comeau triggers numerous synthesizers with his feet, including Moog Taurus pedals he plays bass lines on while simultaneously shredding on guitar. Crown Lands also gets creative with effects processing and signal splitting.

Backing tracks are where they draw the line at though. “What you see is what you get with us,” Bowles says. “That’s kind of been our whole ethos. You know, personally, I’ve made my peace with bands that use tracks. It’s fine. We’re in new age here and you’ve kind of got to go with the flow. But for us, we’ve always maintained we’re never going to use tracks live. It’s just not for us.”

Back in the day, Bowles and Comeau first met when Comeau, who’d recently hitchhiked back to Canada after a stint in Los Angeles, auditioned for a band Bowles was drumming for. Back then, Comeau was mostly a bassist, but he auditioned to be Bowles’ band’s new guitarist. He didn’t get that gig.

But Bowles liked his guitar-playing, so he kept in touch with Comeau. They became friends and eventually started jamming together in a barn. These barn jams are when Bowles began singing for real, he says. “It was just like, let’s make music together,” Bowles says. “And it just kind of started happening.”

The first song they wrote together was “One Good Reason,” a jangly groover. They recorded their first EP, 2016′s “Mantra,” in just two days.

The subject of Rush arose early in their friendship, with Bowles and Comeau each stoked to learn the other was a superfan too. When Comeau revealed he had a tattoo of Rush’s “Starman” logo on his derriere, that sealed the deal.

Other key musical inspirations for Crown Lands include the Allman Brothers (Comeau worships Duane Allman’s slide-guitar playing), Jeff Buckley (see Bowles’ elastic/emotive vocals) and Starcastle (an underappreciated ‘70s prog band from Illinois).

Bowles and Comeau have conflicted feelings about whether to eventually expand Crown Lands ranks. Bowles leans toward keeping things stripped down. Comeau, though, relishes the thought of getting to focus on one instrument onstage, if additional musicians were brought it, and Bowles moving from behind the drumkit to sing out front, like Phil Collins did with Genesis.

Even just the two of them, Bowles and Comeau play music like they’re wielding superpowers. They tap into classic-rock magic and makes it theirs. As longhairs clad in cosmic-hippie garb, Crown Lands look the part too.

Sonically and visually, it’s somewhat reminiscent of another contemporary band walking in huge footsteps. Namely, Michigan rockers Greta Van Fleet, the polarizing (but awesome) young band currently swinging Led Zeppelin’s hammer of the gods.

The parallels don’t stop there. Just as the lads in Greta Van Fleet have won a Grammy Award, Crown Lands notched a Juno, Canada’s equivalent. Both bands have been written about in Rolling Stone by the magazine’s best music journalist, Brian Hiatt.

Now, Crown Lands is on the road with Greta Van Fleet as the opening act on a U.S. arena tour in support of Greta’s 2021 top-10 album “The Battle at Garden’s Gate.” R&B band Durand Jones & The Indications completes the bill.

The musicians in Crown Lands realize what might be at stake for their band. “We’re really grateful, man,” Bowles says. “People who like Greta Van Fleet often like us too, and so it’s huge to be able to play big stages in front of a lot of people in the States.”

In Canada, Crown Lands are approaching theater-level status as a band. But in the U.S., where they haven’t toured much, they’re still playing club-sized venues on their own.

Comeau says Greta Van Fleet is, “kind of like the forefront rock band right now. There are very few rock bands that have come out in the last 20 years that can fill an arena, and it’s amazing what those guys have done. Obviously, musically a lot of people compare Greta to Zeppelin in the same way that people compare us to Rush. And I think that’s like a perfect pairing, right? Both those bands have gone down in history as two of the greatest rock bands. So the fact we’re kind of both carrying those respective torches is pretty sweet.”

The Greta Van Fleet, Durand Jones & The Indications and Crown Lands tour hits Birmingham’s BJCC Legacy Arena 7 p.m. Oct. 29. Tickets start at $35 plus fees via ticketmaster.com. More info at crownlandsmusic.com.

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