Daisy Jones & The Six(39)

Daisy: I shouldn’t have been surprised. It was never gonna be easy with him, was it? I think I grabbed one of the bottles of wine I saw on Teddy’s counter and I opened it up and flopped myself down on the sofa and just started drinking it. I said, “Billy, that’s great that you’ve written a bunch of songs already. I have, too. But we’re writing this album together.”

Billy: The woman is drinking warm white wine before it’s even noon and trying to lecture me on how things should go. She hadn’t even read my songs yet. I handed my work over to her and I said, “Read it first before you go telling me I should throw it away.”

Daisy: I said, “Ditto then.” And I shoved my notebook in his face. I could tell he didn’t want to read it. But he knew he had to.

Billy: I read her stuff, and it wasn’t bad, but I thought it wasn’t The Six. She used so many biblical metaphors. So when she asked me what I thought, I told her that. I said, “We should start with my stuff as the backbone. We can refine it together.”

Daisy was sitting on the sofa with her feet up on the coffee table, which irked me. And then she said, “I’m not singing an entire album about your wife, Billy.”

Daisy: I really liked Camila. But “Se?ora” was about her. “Honeycomb” was about her. “Aurora” was about her. It was boring.

Billy: I said, “You’re writing the same song, too. We both know every song in this book is about the same thing.” Well, that got her upset. She put her hands on her hips and said, “What is that supposed to mean?”

And I said, “Every single one of these songs is about the pills in your pockets.”

Daisy: Billy got this smug look on his face—Billy had this face that he would make when he thought he was smarter than everyone in the room. I swear, I have nightmares still about that goddamn face. I said to him, “You just think everybody’s writing about dope ’cause you can’t have any.”

And he said, “You just go ahead and keep popping pills and writing songs about it. See where that gets you.”

I tossed his pages at him. I said, “Sorry we all can’t be sober and writing songs as interesting as wallpaper paste. Oh, here’s a song about how much I love my wife. And another! And another!”

He tried to tell me I was wrong but I said, “This whole pack of songs is about Camila. You can’t keep writing apology songs to your wife and making the band play them.”

Billy: So out of line.

Daisy: I said, “Good for you for finding some other shit to be addicted to. But it’s not my problem and it’s not the band’s problem and nobody wants to listen to it.” You could see it on his face. That he knew I was right.

Billy: She thought she was brilliant because she’d realized that I’d replaced my addictions. Like I didn’t already know that I clung to my love for my family to keep me sober. That just made me even more mad, that she thought she knew more about me than me.

I said, “You want to know your problem? You think you’re a poet but other than talking about getting high, you don’t have anything to say.”

Daisy: Billy’s one of those people who has a sharp tongue. He can build you up and he can take you down, too.

Billy: She said, “I don’t need this shit.” And she left.

Daisy: I started heading out to my car—getting more rip-roaring angry with every step I took. I had a cherry red Benz back then. I loved that car. Until I crashed it by accident by leaving it in neutral on a hill.

Anyway, that day with Billy, I was headed out to that Benz and I had my keys in my hand and I’m ready to get as far away from him as I can and I realize that if I leave, Billy would just write the album himself. And I turned right back around and I said, “Oh, no, you don’t, asshole.”

Billy: I was really surprised that she came back.

Daisy: I walked right into the pool house and I sat down on the couch and I said, “I’m not giving up my chance to write a great album just because of you. So here’s how it’s gonna go. You hate my stuff, I hate your stuff. So we’ll scrap it all, start from nothing.”

Billy said, “I’m not letting go of ‘Aurora.’ It’s going on the album.”

I said, “Fine.” And then I picked up one of his songs lying around where I’d thrown them and I shook it at him and I said, “But this shit isn’t.”

Billy: I think that was the first time I realized that there’s … There is no one more passionate about the work than Daisy. Daisy cared more than anybody. She was ready to put her whole soul into it. Regardless of how difficult I tried to make it.

And I kept thinking about Teddy telling me she was how we were going to sell out stadiums. So I put out my hand and I said, “Fine.” And we shook on it.

Daisy: Simone used to say that drugs make a person look old, but when I was shaking Billy’s hand—his eyes were already wrinkling at the corners, his skin was freckled, he looked weathered, and he couldn’t have been more than twenty-nine or thirty. I thought, It’s not drugs that make you look old, it’s sobering up.

Billy: It wasn’t very easy, thinking about writing together when we’d said what we’d said to each other.

Daisy: I told Billy I wanted to get lunch before we did much of anything. I wasn’t going to deal with the headache of trying to write with him before I had a burger. I told him I’d drive us to the Apple Pan.