THE FIRST TIME DAISY JONES & THE SIX PLAYED A LIVE GIG, the tequila pictures have been flowing, the drums have been blaring and there was nary a backing monitor in sight. But it wasn’t a beer-soaked native dive bar and even a sweaty, sold-out crowd at The Troubadour — it was a debut efficiency in entrance of roughly 100 executives and crew members at SIR Studios in Los Angeles. Until then, Daisy Jones & the Six have been simply a idea — a group of actors with a sprint of musical expertise to their names. But in September 2021, with this primary “concert” beneath their ‘70s vintage leather belts, they officially became a band.
After a year-and-a-half of diligently practicing their respective instruments and vocal parts, it made sense. They were able to showcase their movements and hear what they sounded like — embrace the ecstasy of commanding a stage — before they began shooting the Amazon limited series about the very fictional band they were becoming — Daisy Jones & the Six.
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The series showrunner Scott Neustadter (500 Days of Summer) credits his wife and executive producer Lauren Neustadter with the “genius idea” for the set. “There was no fakery, everyone was playing their own instruments, [and] everybody was singing into the mics. They all learned what [playing a concert] feels like and could channel it when the cameras were on,” he says, over the phone from New York where he’s on the town for press forward of the discharge of Daisy Jones & the Six.
It was all very rock ‘n’ roll — sans the highest brass. But a gig’s a gig, particularly whenever you’ve truly turn out to be the bell bottom-wearing rock stars you’ve been portraying on-screen.
Truthfully, Daisy Jones & the Six didn’t actually know how adept they’d be on the complete rock star factor. They figured they’d get good, however they’d the chance to get actually good. Initially, the actors had roughly six months to turn out to be expert musicians — they have been meant to be able to shoot by April 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic after all put a wrinkle in these plans, but it surely ended up giving the actors a likelihood to observe for 18 months, together with two rounds of three-month-long band camps and a year-and-a-half of Zooms. By the time they have been able to shoot, Neustadter says, “they were actually really, really talented.” “Everyone couldn’t really believe how far they’d come,” he says, awestruck.
But many of the actors weren’t ranging from scratch. In truth, everybody who auditioned for his or her roles wanted to have “musical experience.” “We didn’t really ask to what extent they had musical experience,” Neustadter laughs, “but we wanted to know that they wouldn’t be coming at it completely blind.” Riley Keough and Sam Claflin, who play people singer-songwriter Daisy Jones and bandleader and guitarist Billy Dunne, respectively, have been shower-singing specialists and did musical theater as youngsters; Suki Waterhouse (keyboardist Karen Sirko) barely performed piano, however she had expertise singing since her teenagers and launched her first single in 2016 with an album final 12 months; Josh Whitehouse (bassist Eddie Roundtree) was already a musician however realized to play bass for the function; Will Harrison (lead guitarist Graham Dunne) was in a band in school; Sebastian Chacon (drummer Warren Rojas) already performed drums. Someone simply wanted to carry the rock stars out of them.
[Courtesy of Amazon]
THE WORLD OF DAISY JONES & THE SIX is steeped within the jolt of ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll, cigarettes and booze, flowy caftans and the Sunset Strip — a love letter to Los Angeles when free love was in and it was all concerning the music, man.
Based on the 2019 best-selling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy & the Six (which premiered March 3) is the gritty and glamorous snapshot of a Nineteen Seventies band’s meteoric rise to fame and its near-instantaneous crash. But past the Laurel Canyon-esque rock ‘n’ roll saga, which is dipped in Fleetwood Mac lore, is a compelling love story and a story of self-realization.
The rock cleaning soap opera tells the story of the Six, a Pittsburgh band led by Billy, his brother Graham, in addition to Eddie, Karen, and Warren. Things get tense and difficult when Daisy crosses paths and finally ends up becoming a member of the band whereas a “will-they-won’t-they” relationship hovers over her and Billy, who’s married to his photographer spouse Camila Alvarez (performed by Camila Morrone). So not solely is the band’s drama all-consuming, however the love and lust that entangles them is, too. However, this love triangle doesn’t embrace punching down.
“Every single person involved wants the best for each other, and it’s the complexity that makes it interesting. Camila has deeply different needs from her marriage than Billy does, and they’re learning how to talk about those things — and the same with Daisy. Ultimately, part of what is so beautiful about writing the show is that there are no enemies,” showrunner Will Graham explains.
Turning Daisy Jones into a rockumentary-style present actually started with showrunner Scott Neustadter again in 2017. The self-proclaimed “music dork” was given the early manuscripts of Reid’s e book by her supervisor Brad Mendelsohn as a result of he thought he’d prefer it. Well, he greater than appreciated it — his dream undertaking was making a film model of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 basic Rumours. “I went crazy,” he laughs. It was across the time his spouse had simply began at Hello Sunshine with Reese Witherspoon (she’s now president of Film and Television there), and he insisted that the e book would make for a thrilling TV present. “We’d never worked together, and I was like, ‘We should maybe do it together. It’d be really fun,’” he notes. After exhibiting it to Witherspoon (who additionally executive-produced the present), the trio insisted Reid work with them. “There was no other choice. We just had to get the opportunity to make this TV show,” he insists.
There are a handful of liberties taken within the on-screen adaptation — there’s a connection between Eddie and Camila within the present; there are some shifts total within the romantic relationships; report label producer Teddy Price (performed by Tom Wright) and disco pioneer Simone Jackson (performed by Nabiyah Be) have a lot greater roles within the present; Warren’s final identify modified from “Rhodes” to “Rojas”; and Pete Loving, the sixth member of the band, isn’t within the present. But Daisy and Billy are there in all of their glory — Daisy and her defiant spirit chilled out by her shimmering caftans and Billy brooding in his beloved Canadian tuxedos like Billy Crudup’s Russell Hammond.
[Courtesy of Amazon]
Casting Daisy was maybe the best a part of making the sequence. “Very early on in the process, Riley had read the book, raised her hand and said, ‘I think I was put on this Earth to play Daisy,’” Scott Neustadter recalls.
Graham adds over the phone, “Riley is brave without being fearless, if that makes sense. There was something about that combination of confidence and vulnerability that for all of us just rings a bell with who Daisy is as a character. Then when we heard her sing and we watched her read [for the part], you just thought, ‘OK, this person has this character inside of them.’” Keough was a straightforward “yes,” but it surely set the bar actually excessive.
As simple as it was to cast Daisy, it was equally as challenging for nabbing an actor for the role of Billy, a complicated guy who wants the best for his family and the band but wrestles with his own ego. “We saw every Billy in the world, and it’s such a hard part to nail,” he adds. “We just wanted to make it perfect.” Enter Claflin, the last person they cast in the show. “Billy’s a complicated guy and does some complicated things, and what really struck me in our meetings with him, but also in watching him work, is Sam has an inherent goodness that I think comes through in Billy,” Graham notes.
Claflin was up for the emotional challenges the role brought because he was weathering his own roller coaster of personal strife, including a divorce from his then-wife Laura Haddock. “There’s something about this job being at this time in my personal life and after COVID,” he says trailing off, before Keough adds, “We all had gone through so much in our lives and COVID, and so everything was heightened.”
Claflin continues, “I’d go for runs in the morning and listen to Joni Mitchell crying, and then go to work going, ‘OK, I’m cried out for the day.’ ‘But it was so many emotional scenes. So many of them felt so close to home.’”
Claflin and Keough found the band’s final on-screen performance together at Chicago’s Soldier Field – shot in New Orleans at Tad Gormley Stadium — the most emotionally tolling. “I couldn’t stop sobbing,” Claflin recalls, as Keough interjects, “I couldn’t either, and they were like, ‘Riley, I don’t think we want you to cry in this. Go.’”
After each take, Claflin had to run off and sob. “I was like, ‘I’ll never get to sing it again,’” he says, fake crying. “But then the producers were like, ‘Sam, we want to do one where you don’t come on already crying.’”
But it’s that raw vulnerability that fueled the on-screen messiness between Daisy and Billy, as the actors and crew filmed throughout Los Angeles, New Orleans and Hydra, Greece.
[Courtesy of Amazon]
Of course, any Fleetwood Mac fan will say it’s easy to see the band’s influence in Daisy Jones & the Six. They’ll imagine Stevie Nicks as Daisy when she twirls in the stage light with her billowy sleeves and Lindsey Buckingham and Nicks’ stormy relationship as they watch Daisy and Billy’s dramatic storm-outs and magnetic stares onstage. After all, Jenkins Reid did draw inspiration from the rock outfit. In a 2019 essay for Hello Sunshine, the production company behind the series, she revealed that she “kept coming back to that moment when Lindsey watched Stevie sing [the 1997 live performance] of ‘Landslide.’” How it looked so much like two people in love. And yet, we’ll never truly know what lived between them.” Her goal was to explore “how the lines between real life and performance can get blurred, about how singing about old wounds might keep them fresh.” She told The Guardian that she needed “to know if Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham slept together after Rumours.”
The rock mythology on the show, however, goes deeper than that one ‘70s band. According to Neustadter, the band are a composite of John Fogerty, Tom Petty, Joni Mitchell, Judee Sill and the whole Laurel Canyon scene of singer-songwriters. And with Billy specifically, there’s “a lot of Bruce Springsteen in him,” Scott Neustadter notes.
Individually, each actor channeled different artists. Keough studied Cher, Joni Mitchell, and Linda Ronstadt, but also watched Robert Plant and Jimi Hendrix “to see what their physicality was onstage.” “I found that a lot of the women in that era, aside from Janis Joplin, weren’t as big in their movement as Daisy was written to be,” she notes over Zoom from a hotel room in Los Angeles. “So it was about marrying the reality with this character, but also making her feel free and ahead of her time.” Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis, added that he “wasn’t who I was looking at for reference for this, but I certainly have seen this world a lot in my life and my knowledge of the music world.”
Waterhouse took cues from the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde and Blondie’s Debbie Harry, but there was one figure she credits in particular. “Christine McVie, of course, [was a huge inspiration] because Karen is English in the show, and who’s more of a quintessential English keyboard player than her with a great, gorgeous spirit and somebody that knew what it was like to support a frontwoman the way that she did,” she explains over Zoom from a hotel in Los Angeles. “So I definitely owe it to her.”
Chacon studied flamboyant players like Tito Puente and drummer Jo Jones. He ditched puckering his lips for “spicy faces.” “I was like, ‘No, I have to make silly faces. It’s the only way for this character to work,’” he explains over Zoom from a hotel in Los Angeles. Whitehouse was inspired by bassists Jaco Pastorius, Victor Wooten, and Pino Palladino, but also watched documentaries for “general physicality,” he adds over Zoom.
For her function as Simone, Be channeled Diana Ross and Chaka Khan, however drew from lesser-known artists and background vocalists like Linda Clifford and Claudia Lennear, as effectively. She additionally “listened to a Spotify playlist called ‘Brazilian Disco Funk,’ and had on repeat both ‘Reasons’ by Minnie Riperton and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ by Simon & Garfunkel.
Their patchwork of influences laid the groundwork for the makings of a very real fake band and their on-screen artist friends.
[Courtesy of Amazon]
WHILE MANY OF POP CULTURE’S MOST BELOVED FAKE BANDS were voiced by already established singer-songwriters — The Wonders by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, Josie & the Pussycats by Letters to Cleo’s Kay Hanley, Stillwater by Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready — Daisy Jones & the Six had to feel real, they had to release an album.
Enter Aurora, the rockers’ debut, which is nothing short of real. Helmed by songwriter and executive producer Blake Mills with additional production from Tony Berg, along with revered talents including Phoebe Bridgers, Jackson Browne, Marcus Mumford, Z Berg and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, the album was recorded at Sound City Studios (also the setting of the book and TV series), where Fleetwood Mac made Rumours and Nirvana shaped Nevermind. “You can feel the ghosts in the walls, and there’s just an unpretentious magic about the place that we wanted to come across in the show as well,” Graham explains.
The songwriters and musicians were given a handful of parameters for penning tracks, including a general storyline and instruments from no later than the 1970s. “We wanted the music to be reminiscent of that time period, but we also wanted it to stand on its own in 2023, to have that fresh sound,” music supervisor Frankie Pine explains over the phone from Los Angeles. Songwriter Chris Weisman, who penned several of the tracks from the series, including the album’s title track, found that writing imaginary hit songs for the 1970s was surprisingly liberating. “The constricting place to try to write a hit song is here [in 2023] because we’re so much more conservative musically now than the 1970s were,” he explains over the phone from Vermont.
And regardless of Reid’s e book that includes monitor names and lyrics for the band’s songs, not one of the lyrics have been used. But that doesn’t imply they didn’t channel Reid’s materials. For occasion, the present’s diss monitor “More Fun to Miss” is the e book’s “Impossible Woman,” the tune Billy writes for Daisy when he’s indignant together with her. “It felt hard to be like, ‘Oh, and also you have to use all of these lyrics because you’re not going to tell Jackson Browne or Phoebe Bridgers or any of those people ‘We don’t want any of your lyrics,’” Scott Neustadter explains. In fact, it was the original songs themselves that informed the tension, drama, and interactions on the show — the album was recorded before filming began.
Though the Daisy Jones & the Six actors played everything while they were shooting for authenticity purposes, Aurora featured Keough and Claflin’s vocals but enlisted professional backing musicians for the instrumentals.
Ahead of the series, Daisy Jones and the Six debuted the fiery kiss-off “Regret Me,” in addition to their second single “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb),” a rollicking ‘70s rock track flanked by kickdrums with a searing guitar solo. “It had to be the hit song. It had to be the pinnacle of their relationship song,” Pine says of the latter.
While the songwriters weren’t attempting to make a Fleetwood Mac report, a few of the songs have been impressed by the band. Z Berg cited the Rumours hit “Dreams” as a direct inspiration for the harmony-rich soft-rock monitor “Let Me Down Easy,” whereas “Regret Me” is Daisy and Billy’s personal twist on the torch tune “Silver Springs.” “There was something about the authenticity of songs that were from real places of heartbreak and longing that really resonated more and were making it into the show,” she remembers. She jokes that a handful of the songs she penned together with “The River” and “Let Me Down Easy” — have been written in a Daisy Jones-like love triangle “by two girls and a guy, me and two people who were dating at the time.” “I feel like Daisy Jones wants what Daisy Jones wants,” she laughs over the telephone from Los Angeles.
Ultimately, the nice endeavor of the Daisy Jones & the Six LP paid off: Aurora was the primary album by a fictional band to reach No. 1 on iTunes. Plus, there’s extra music coming from the music masterminds of Daisy Jones & the Six — 25 songs from the sequence whole are set to be launched later this 12 months. In addition to the EP-like launch of tracks with every episode, there’s one other companion album on the way in which that includes the opposite artists from the present like Simone Jackson, The Dunne Brothers, and Wyatt Stone.
And naturally, the explosive hype surrounding the band have led to pleas from followers on-line for the TV stars-turned-band to play live shows. So will they? Everyone has their very own imaginative and prescient for Daisy Jones & the Six to formally meet their fanbase.
Much just like the present, Pine hopes that the band earn a stint as musical friends on Saturday Night Live. Scott Neustadter is able to purchase a ticket to a present on tour (“If the timing could work, that would be the coolest thing ever.”) Waterhouse suggests a Troubadour present the place Morrone quips over Zoom from Los Angeles that she’ll “be photographing.”
And Keough and Claflin? They’re able to promote tickets themselves.
“We’ve been away from each other for so long that when we get in a room together, we’re so giggly and excited to see each other. If you asked us to do anything together, we’d be like, ‘Yes.’ Get on a ship and sail around the world, we’d be like, ‘OK,’” Keough reveals.
“I think we’d all jump at the chance,” Claflin provides.
In the meantime, begin planning your Daisy Jones-approved outfits.
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