Daisy Jones & The Six(52)

Eddie: It takes a lot of work, keeping Billy sober, keeping Daisy level. I doubt Teddy Price would have been tripping over himself to make sure I didn’t step in a bar.

Graham: We started calling them the Chosen ones. I don’t know if they ever knew that. But … I mean, that’s what they were.





Rod: We were working to record the backlog of songs that Daisy and Billy had written. I think they had almost the entire album by that point. We were already talking about what could fit on the record and what couldn’t.

People don’t think about it anymore because the technology is so different but we had such a tight running time back then. You could fit twenty-two minutes on the side of a record most of the time.

Karen: Graham wrote a song called “The Canyon.”

Graham: I had written this song, the only lyrics I’d ever written that I really liked. Now, I wasn’t a songwriter. That was always Billy’s thing. But I’d scratched some stuff down from time to time. And I’d finally written a song I was proud of.

The song was about how, even though Karen and I were both living large by that point, I’d be happy living in a crappy house as long as I was with her. I based it on our old house we all lived in in Topanga Canyon. Where Pete and Eddie still lived.

You know, the heat barely worked and there was rarely hot water and one of the windows was busted and all that. But that didn’t matter if we were together. “There’s no water in the sink/and the bathtub leaks/but I’ll hold your warm body in a cold shower/stand there with you and waste the hours.”

Karen: I was a little skittish about it. I never promised Graham any future for us. And I was worried he was seeing one. But unfortunately, back then at least, I tended to just avoid problems I didn’t want to deal with.

Warren: Graham wrote a song and asked Billy to consider it for the album and Billy blew him off.

Billy: By the time Graham came in with this song he wanted us to record, Daisy and I had the album almost done. And the songs were complicated and nuanced and a little dark.

Daisy and I had talked about wanting to write one or two more songs and we wanted at least one of them to be a little harder, less romantic.

What Graham showed me … Graham wrote a love song. Just a simple little love song. It didn’t have the complexity that Daisy and I were chasing.

Graham: It was the first song I really wrote and I wrote it for the woman I loved. And Billy was so involved in his own shit he didn’t even know who I wrote it about and he didn’t ask. He read my song in about thirty seconds and said, “Maybe on the next album, man. We got this one now.”

I’d always had Billy’s back. I’d always been there for him. Supported him through anything and everything.

Billy: We said, with this album, I wouldn’t tell anybody how to do their jobs. So I wasn’t going to listen to anybody telling me and Daisy what to sing. If we’re staying in our lanes, let’s stay in our lanes.

Karen: Graham sold it to the Stun Boys and they had a big hit off of it. I was happy about that. Happy how it all ended. I wouldn’t have wanted to have to play that song night after night.

I never understood people putting their real emotions into something they know they have to play on tour over and over and over again.





Rod: That was around the time that Daisy and Billy started recording their vocals together. On most of the tracks, they were in the booth at the same time, singing into the same mike, harmonizing in real time together.

Eddie: Billy and Daisy on the same mike in one of those small booths … I mean, we’d all kill to be stuck up that close to Daisy.

Artie Snyder: It would have been a lot easier for me to have them in two different booths so I could isolate their vocals. Them singing into the same mike made my job about ten times harder.

If Daisy had an area where she was soft, I couldn’t overdub it without losing Billy’s. It made cutting back and forth between takes almost impossible.

We’d have to record over and over and over again to get a take where they both sounded good at the same time. The band would go home for the night and Daisy and Billy and Teddy and I would still be there, burning the midnight oil. It really limited how polished I could make the tracks. I actually was pretty pissed off. But Teddy wasn’t backing me up.

Rod: I thought Teddy made the right call. Because it showed on the track. You could feel they were breathing the same air as they sang. It was … I mean, there’s no other word for it. It was intimate.

Billy: You know, when you have music that has all the knots sanded down and the scratches buffed out … where’s the emotion in that?

Rod: I heard this secondhand, from Teddy. So I can’t vouch for how true it is. But there was a night when Billy and Daisy pulled an all-nighter doing overdubs on “This Could Get Ugly.”

Teddy said during one of the takes, late at night, Billy didn’t take his eyes off Daisy for the whole take. And they finished and Billy caught Teddy watching. And Billy immediately stopped—tried to pretend he hadn’t been looking at all.

Daisy: Just how honest do we have to get here? I know I told you I’d tell you everything but how much “everything” do you really want to know?





Billy: We were at Teddy’s pool house. Daisy was wearing a black dress with the thin straps. What are those called?