Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,61

“This song is for us to sing?”

Billy said, “No, I think you should give it a shot on your own. I wrote it for your register.”

I said, “It seems more obvious that a man would be singing this about a woman.”

Billy said, “It’s more interesting if a woman is singing it. It gives it a haunting kind of quality.”

I said, “All right, I’ll take a stab at it.”

I took some time with it while everybody was lining out their parts. A few days later, I went in. I listened as everybody laid their tracks down. Just trying to find a way into it.

When it was my turn to get in there, I gave it my best. I tried to make it feel a little sad, maybe. Like I missed this woman. I was thinking, Maybe this woman is my mother, maybe this woman is my lost sister, maybe there is something I need from this woman. You know?

I thought, It’s wistful, it’s ethereal. That kind of a thing. But I was doing take after take and I could tell it wasn’t working.

And I kept looking to everybody, thinking, Somebody get me out of this mess. I’m flailing over here. And I didn’t know what to do. And I started getting angry.

Karen: Daisy has absolutely no formal training. She does not know the names of chords, she does not know various vocal techniques. If what Daisy does naturally doesn’t work, then you have to take Daisy off the song.

Daisy: I’m just hoping somebody saves me from myself. I say I want to take five. Teddy suggests I go for a walk, clear my head. I walk around the block. But I’m only making it worse because I just keep thinking I can’t do it and Of course I can’t do it and all that. And I finally just give up. I get in my car and I drive away. I couldn’t deal with it, so I left.

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.