Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,66
and staying on the right path. It was about drugs and sex and love and denial and a whole mess of stuff.
That’s where “Turn It Off” came from. The two of us writing about how every time you think you’ve got something licked, it keeps rearing its head.
Daisy: “Turn It Off” was me and Billy at the pool house, him on the guitar, me pitching the line “I keep trying to turn it off/but, baby, you keep turning me on,” and then it all just snowballed from there.
I’d say a line, he’d say a line. We’d be scribbling each other’s stuff out, writing over it. All just trying to get to the best version of the song.
Billy: Daisy and I got to a point where we could really tinker with something for a while. We had enough faith to keep working on something even if it didn’t come easy. “Young Stars” ended up developing like that.
Daisy: We worked on “Young Stars” in fits and starts. We’d have it and then lose it and pick it up days later. I think it was Billy who suggested the line “We only look like young stars/because you can’t see old scars.” That worked for me. We finally built around that.
Billy: We were using a lot of words that made you think of physical pain. Ache and knots and break and punch and all that. It started to fit in well with the rest of the album—how it hurts to be fighting your own instincts.
Daisy: “I’d tell you the truth just to watch you blush/but you can’t handle the hit so I’ll hold the punch.” That song ended up cutting so close to the heart, in a lot of ways. Maybe too close. “I believe you can break me/but I’m saved for the one who saved me.”
Billy: I mean, it’s hard to say what a song is about sometimes. Sometimes even you don’t know why you wrote that line, or how it came into your head, or even what it means.
Daisy: The songs that we were writing together … [pauses] I started feeling like a lot of what Billy was writing about was how he was actually feeling. It seemed clear to me that there were things unsaid that were being said in our work together.
Billy: They’re songs. You pull them out of wherever you can. You change the meanings to fit the moments sometimes. Some songs came more from my heart than others, I suppose.
Daisy: It’s so strange, how someone’s silence, someone’s insistence that something isn’t happening can be so suffocating. But it can be. And suffocating is exactly the word, too. You feel like you can’t breathe.
Karen: I think Daisy showed me “Please” before she showed it to anyone else. And I thought it was a cool song. And I said, “What’s Billy think?”
And she said, “I haven’t shown him yet. I wanted to show you first.”
I thought that was weird.
Billy: Daisy handed me the song, and I could tell she was feeling sort of nervous about it but I immediately liked it. I added a few lines myself, removed a few.
Daisy: It’s very vulnerable, being an artist, telling the truth like that, like we’re doing now. When you’re living your life, you’re so inside your head, you’re swirling around in your own pain, that it’s hard to see how obvious it is to the people around you. These songs I was writing felt coded and secret, but I suspect they weren’t coded and secret at all.
Billy: “This Could Get Ugly.” … That was one, we had the song before we had the lyrics done. Graham and I had come up with a guitar riff we liked and that song spiraled out of that. I actually went to Daisy and said, “Got anything for this?”
Daisy: I had this idea in my head. Of “ugly” being a good thing. I wanted to write a song about feeling like you knew you had somebody’s number, even if they didn’t know it.
Billy: Daisy and I met up at Teddy’s place one morning and I played it for her again and she threw some stuff out. She was talking about some guy she was seeing, I don’t remember who. And she had a few lines that really spoke to me. I really liked “Write a list of things you’ll regret/I’d be on top smoking a cigarette.” I loved that line.
I said to her, “What’s this guy putting you through to write a song like this?”