Page 47 of Daisy Jones & The Six

BILLY:I decided, with every song on that album, to give only the feedback that felt really necessary. Because I’d go back with Teddy when we were mixing it and that’s when I could really refine.

DAISY:I went into the studio to hear everybody play “Aurora” for the first time and I was blown away by it. I was really excited. Billy and I played with the vocals a bit and found a great balance for it all.

ARTIESNYDER:We miked everything. We must have messed with the setup a thousand times to get it just right. We had Karen and Graham on the side, Pete and Warren in the back, Eddie was toward the front, and then Billy and Daisy were in iso booths but they could still see everybody.

I had Teddy in the control room next to me. He kept smoking cigarettes, letting the ash get on my boards. I kept wiping it away and he just kept dropping it.

When everything was perfectly in place, I said, “All right, ‘Aurora,’ take one. Somebody count it off.”

DAISY:We played it the whole way through. All of us together. We just played it over and over. As a band. A real band.

I looked at Billy at one point and we smiled at each other and I thought,This is happening.I was in a band. I was one of them. The seven of us, playing music.

BILLY:As Daisy and I were singing it, I had to do a few takes in a row to really warm up but Daisy hit it right out of the gate. She really…Daisy was a natural. And if you’re going up against somebody like Daisy, then yeah, that’s annoying. But if she’s on your team…wow. Powerhouse.

ARTIESNYDER:I was still getting a feel for how the album would sound and my team was still tinkering with the setup. The early takes sounded a little tinny, and that’s what I was focused on. When you start off on an album, with new people and different sounds, in a new studio and all of that…you really have to get your levels right, your mikes right. I was obsessive about that stuff. Until it was coming through clean on the cans, I could not focus on anything else.

But, even knowing that about myself, looking back on it…I can’t believe I had no idea. We were making a massive hit record. And I had no idea.

DAISY:I knew it was gonna be huge. I really think, even then, I knew.

DAISY:A few days later, I’m going through my journal, back at my place. I think maybe it was a weekend. And I find one of Billy’s songs in there. One that he wrote for the album. “Midnights.” I think maybe at the time it was called “Memories.” I must have packed it up with my things by mistake when we were back at Teddy’s. So I started rereading it. I probably read it ten times in a row, sitting there.

It was pretty sickeningly sweet. All about how Billy has these happy memories with Camila. But there were a few good lines in there. So I started scribbling on top of it. Playing with it.

BILLY:The next time we met up at Teddy’s, Daisy handed me “Midnights.” I’d written it over the summer. It was pretty straightforward when I wrote it. But she handed it back to me, pen marks all over the place and I could barely read any of the words. I held the page in my hand and I said, “What did you do to my song?”

DAISY:I told him it was actually a great song. I said, “Turns out, it just needed a little bit of darkness to it.”

BILLY:I said, “I understand what you’re saying but I can’t read what you wrote.” She got mad and snatched the paper out of my hand.

DAISY:I was going to have to read it to him. I started reading the first verse but then I realized that was dumb. I said, “Play the song as you wrote it.”

BILLY:I got my guitar and I started playing and singing the words as I originally wrote them.

DAISY:I cut him off once I got the gist of it.

BILLY:She put her hand on the neck of the guitar to shut me up. She said, “I get where you’re going. Start from the beginning. Give this a listen.”

DAISY:I sang him his song back, this time with my changes.

BILLY:It went from a song about your best memories to a song about what you can and can’t remember. I had to admit it was more subtle, more complicated. Much more open to interpretation.

It was very similar to what I had envisioned when I wrote it, but just…[laughs]better than what I got on the page, frankly.

DAISY:I didn’t change a lot of his song, really. I just added in this element of what you don’t remember to highlight what you do remember. And then I restructured it, to include a second voice.

BILLY:By the time she was done, I was really excited about it.

DAISY:Billy immediately went into writing mode. He took the paper from me, grabbed a pen, started reordering a little bit. That’s how I knew he liked it.

By the end, we’d taken this song that Billy had about Camila and we made it about so much more than that.

BILLY:We played it for everybody down at the studio. Just her and me and the guitar, over in the lounge.

GRAHAM:I dug the song. Billy and I started talking about a solo during the bridge. We were on the same page.

EDDIE:I said to Billy, “This is good, let me get started on my piece on it.”

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