Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,68
having friends.
I knew getting high wasn’t a long-term solution. But God, it’s so easy. It’s just so easy.
But of course, it’s not easy at all, either. Because one minute you’re just trying to nurse a wound. And the next, you’re desperately trying to hide the fact that you’re now a jury-rigged, taped-up, shortcutted mess of a person and the wound you were nursing has become an abscess.
But I was skinny and pretty so who cared, right?
Rod: Teddy was always trying to keep Billy and Daisy calm. They were … Billy and Daisy together was like tending a little fire. Good if controlled. Just keep the kerosene away from it and we’ll all be fine.
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