Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,57

piece on it.”

And Billy said, “Well, your part is written already. Just go with the guitar as I played it.”

I said, “Let me tinker with it.”

He said, “Nothing to tinker with. Daisy and I have been reworking this one back and forth. I’m telling you, play it like I played it.”

I said, “I don’t want to play it like you played it.”

He just patted me on the back and said, “It’s cool. Just play it like I played it.”

Billy: The rhythm guitar part was already done. But I said, “All right, man. Go ahead and try to see what you can come up with.” By the time we recorded it, he’d come back around to exactly what I played for him.

Eddie: I changed it up. He didn’t have it exactly right. There wasn’t only one way to play that song. I changed it up. And it was better. I knew how to play my own riffs. I knew what worked. We were all supposed to be taking our own shots. So I took my own shot.

Billy: It is very frustrating, when you know how something should be done but you have to pretend someone else has a good idea, when you know you’re just going to end up using your own. But that’s the price of doing business with somebody like Eddie Loving. He’s got to believe everything is his idea or he won’t do it.

And, look, it’s my fault. I told everybody it was an equal opportunity band. And I shouldn’t have done that. Because that is just not a sustainable system. Look at Springsteen. Springsteen knew how to do it. But me? I had to sit there and pretend people like Eddie Loving knew better than me how to play guitar on the songs I wrote on my guitar.

Karen: I didn’t see any of the tense stuff between Billy and Eddie on that song. I heard about it later from both of them but at the time I was … preoccupied.

Graham: You know what’s a good time? Giving your girl a roll in the closet at the studio while everybody else is recording and the two of you have to be so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

That was making love, man. It felt like love. It felt like we were the only two people in the entire world who mattered. Me and Karen. It felt like I could show her how much I loved her, right there in that tight space, not saying anything at all.

Warren: When we were messing around on that song, on “Midnights,” Daisy came up to me and suggested that I hold the drums on the bridge and I thought for a moment and I said, “Yeah, that’s a great idea.” Daisy and I always got along really well in that regard. We were about the only two people who could manage not to have too much ego with each other.

I once told her I thought she sang “Turn It Off” like she was in heat and she said, “I see what you mean. I think I’ll pull back on the chorus.” Just like that.

Some people just don’t threaten each other. And other people threaten everything about each other. Just the way it is.

Rod: I started to do some calculations. Could we replace Eddie if we needed to? Would Pete leave with him? What would that mean for us? I’m not gonna lie. I started putting feelers out for other guitarists. Started planning out whether Billy could just take over Eddie’s parts. I saw the writing on the wall.

Turns out I wasn’t reading exactly right. But I saw the writing on the wall.

Warren: Being proud that you predicted Eddie would leave the band is like saying, “I predicted the sun would come out today,” the day before a nuclear disaster. Yeah, man. Great guess. But you didn’t exactly notice the world was ending?

Daisy: At the end of that day, when Billy was going home, he said, “Thank you for what you did with this song.”

And I said something like “Yeah, of course.”

But then Billy stopped in place. He put his hand on my arm. He made a real point of it. He said, “I’m serious. You made the song better.”

I … That meant a lot. That meant a lot. Maybe meant too much.

Billy: I was starting to see, as Teddy had pushed me to, that sometimes you get to more complex places, artistically, when you have more people contributing. That’s not always