Daisy Jones & The Six(47)

Billy: I wrote the song for her. I mean I wrote it for her to sing. So that made me mad. Her giving up like that.

Obviously, I understood why she was frustrated. I mean, Daisy is shockingly talented. Like it will shock you, to be near it. Her talent. But she didn’t know how to control it. She couldn’t call on it, you know? She just had to hope it would be there.

But giving up wasn’t cool. Especially not after trying for, you know, a couple of hours, tops. That’s the problem with people who don’t have to work for things. They don’t know how to work for things.

Daisy: That night, somebody knocks on my door. I was with Simone making dinner. I open the door and there’s Billy Dunne.

Billy: I went there with the express purpose of getting her to sing the damn song. Did I want to go back to the Chateau Marmont? No, I did not. But that’s what I had to do, so I did it.

Daisy: He sits me down and Simone is in the kitchen making Harvey Wallbangers and she offers Billy one.

Billy: And immediately Daisy blocks me and says, “No!” As if I was going to take the drink from Simone’s hand.

Daisy: I was embarrassed that Simone has offered it to him because I knew he already felt like I was a scummy boozehound drug addict. And if Billy thought I was going to knock him off the wagon, I was going to do everything in my power to make sure that wasn’t true.

Billy: It … surprised me. She had actually been listening to me.

Daisy: Billy said to me, “You have to sing this song.” I told him that I just didn’t have the right voice for it. We talked back and forth for a while, about what the song meant and whether there was a way into it for me and finally Billy just said that it was about me. That he had written it about me. That I’m the impossible woman. “She’s blues dressed up like rock ’n’ roll/untouchable, she’ll never fold.” That was me. And something kind of clicked in my head.

Billy: I absolutely never told Daisy the song was about her. I wouldn’t have done that because the song wasn’t about her.

Daisy: That felt like a breaking point into it. But I still said to him that I wasn’t sure I was the right sound.

Billy: I told her that the song needed a raw energy. It needed to feel like it crackled under the needle. It needed to feel electric. Like she was singing to save her life.

Daisy: That’s not my voice.

Billy: I said, “You need to go into the studio tomorrow and try again. Promise me that you will try again.” And she agreed.

Daisy: So I go in there the next morning and they had cleared out the place. The rest of the band wasn’t there. It was just Billy, Teddy, Rod, and Artie at the boards. I walked in and I just … I knew this was going to be different.

Rod: I went out to smoke a cigarette as Billy pulled Daisy into the booth and started giving her a pep talk.

Billy: I knew how the song was supposed to sound and I just kept trying to think of how to explain it to her. What I realized, eventually, was that Daisy’s all about effortlessness. And this had to be a song that sounded like it hurt to sing, like it was taking all the effort in her body. I wanted Daisy to feel, after she was done singing it, that she had run a marathon.

Daisy: There is a grit to my voice but it’s not a deep-in-your-gut kind of grit. And that’s what Billy wanted.

Billy: I said something like “Sing it so hard, so loud, that you can’t control where your voice goes. Let your voice crack. Lose control of it.”

I gave her permission to sound bad. Think of how you sing when you’re singing to the radio at full volume. When you can’t hear yourself, you’re not afraid to really belt it out because you won’t have to cringe when your voice breaks or you veer off-key. Daisy needed that kind of freedom. That takes a crapload of confidence. And Daisy didn’t actually have confidence. She was always good. Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.

I said, “If you sing this song in a way where you sound good the entire time, you’ve lost.”

Daisy: He said, “This song isn’t meant to be pretty. Don’t sing it like it is.”

Rod: I came back in and Billy’s got Daisy in the booth with the lights dimmed, a Vicks inhaler, a steaming mug of tea next to her, a pile of lozenges and some tissues, a huge pitcher of water, I don’t know, you name it, it was in there with her.

And then Daisy sat down in a chair and Billy got right back up, jumped out of the control room, went into the booth with her again. He took the chair away, raised the mike. He said, “You need to stand up and sing so hard your knees buckle.”

Daisy looked terrified.

Daisy: He wanted me to shed every inhibition I had. Billy was saying that he wanted me to be willing to fail spectacularly in front of him—and Teddy and Artie. But I knew there was no moving past my own ego stone sober.

I said, “Can we get some wine in here?”

Billy said, “You don’t need it.”

I said, “No, you don’t need it.”

Billy: Rod goes right in there with a bottle of brandy.

Rod: I’m not about to take away the easy stuff and have her running that much faster for the hard stuff.

Daisy: I took a few swigs and I looked at Billy through the window and I said, into the mike, “All right, you want it to sound a little ugly, right?” He nodded. And I said, “And no one’s gonna judge me if I end up sounding like a screeching cat?”