Daisy Jones & The Six(22)

Daisy: I’d been working on it all night. I’d been in the studio with Teddy a few days before, listening to it over and over. I had a good idea of what I wanted to do.

Billy: Daisy just said, “No, thanks.” Like that. Like I had nothing of value to offer.

Rod: She went right into the booth and started warming up.

Karen: I said, “Guys, we don’t all need to be here watching her.” But nobody moved.

Daisy: I finally had to say, “Can I have some room to breathe, please?”

Billy: Finally everybody started funneling out except me, Teddy, and Artie.

Artie Snyder: I miked her up in one of the iso booths. We did a couple test runs and for whatever reason, the mike wasn’t working.

It took me about forty-five minutes to get that mike going. She was standing there, singing into it on and off, going, “Testing, testing, one two three.” Helping me out. I could feel Billy getting more and more tense. But Daisy was so calm about it. I said, “I’m sorry about this,” and she said, “It takes as long as it takes and you’ll get it when you get it.”

Daisy always did right by me. She always made it seem like she cared about how my day was going. Not a lot of people did that.

Daisy: I had read the lyrics to the song what felt like a million times. I had my own idea of how I wanted it to go.

Billy sang it in this sort of pleading way. I thought the way he sang it made it seem like he wasn’t sure he believed his own promise. And I loved that. I thought that made it so interesting. So I had this plan to sing my part like I wanted to believe him but maybe deep down inside I didn’t. I thought that gave the song some layers.

When we got the mike working—you know, Artie’s giving me the signal to start and Billy and Teddy are watching me—I got up into the mike and I sang it like I didn’t believe Billy was going to buy a house near the honeycomb, that it wasn’t really ever gonna happen. That was my angle on it.

During the refrain, the lyrics were originally “The life we want will wait for us/We will live to see the lights coming off the bay/And you will hold me, you will hold me, you will hold me/until that day.”

I sang it straight through on the first go-around but the second time I sang it, I changed it up a bit. I said, “Will the life we want wait for us?/ Will we live to see the lights coming off the bay?/Will you hold me, will you hold me, will you hold me until that day?”

I sang them as questions as opposed to statements.

Billy didn’t even let me finish before he popped up and hit the talkback.

Billy: She sang the words wrong. It didn’t make sense to have her keep going with the words wrong.

Artie Snyder: Billy would never have allowed someone to interrupt him like that. I was genuinely surprised when he did that.

Billy: The song was about a happy ending after turmoil. I didn’t think doubt worked in that context.

Karen: Billy wrote that song trying to convince himself that this future he saw with Camila was a sure thing. But he and Camila both knew Billy could relapse at any moment.

I mean, the first month he was out of rehab, he gained ten pounds because he was eating chocolate bars in the middle of the night. And then when he stopped doing that, there was all the woodworking. You’d go over to Billy and Camila’s and Billy would be obsessing over some mahogany dining room table he was trying to make and there were all these shitty dining chairs he’d nailed together.

And don’t get me started on the shopping. Oh, and the running was maybe the worst of it. For about two months, Billy would run however many miles a day. He’d be wearing those little dolphin shorts and muscle tanks bobbing down the street.

Rod: Billy was trying. This was a guy who made so many things seem easy. But he was trying very hard to stay sober. And you could see the strain on him.

Karen: Billy was writing songs trying to tell himself he had got it all under control, that decades out he’ll still have his sobriety and his wife and his family.

And in about two minutes of singing, Daisy pulled the tablecloth from under the dishes.

Rod: Daisy did a few more takes and it really seemed easy for her. She didn’t have to work for it. She wasn’t bleeding for every note.

But when Billy left the studio, I could tell he was pretty tense. I said, “Don’t take work home with you.” But the problem wasn’t that he had brought work home with him. It was that he had brought home into work.

Karen: “Honeycomb” used to be a song about security, and it became a song about insecurity.

Billy: That night, I told Camila about how Daisy sang it, with the questions.

You know, Camila’s got her hands full with Julia and I’m talking her ear off complaining about this song. She just said, “It’s not real life, Billy. It’s a song. Don’t get bent out of shape.” It was so simple for her. I should just get over it.

But I couldn’t get over it. I did not like that Daisy turned those lines into questions and I didn’t like that she had felt the right to do it.

Camila: When you put your life in your music, you can’t be clearheaded about your music.

Graham: I think Daisy was just very unexpected for Billy.

Artie Snyder: When we cut together the version with Daisy, it was so compelling—their voices together—that Teddy wanted to strip almost everything else away. He had me soften the drums a bit, amp up the keys, cut out some of Graham’s more distracting flourishes.