DAISY: I said, “You don’t know anything about this song!”
He said, “What are you talking about?” He knew it was Wyatt Stone that wrote it, obviously. But he didn’t know the rest of it.
I said, “I dated Wyatt Stone. This is my song.”
BILLY: I said, “You’re Tiny Love?” And Daisy started telling me this story about her and Wyatt and how she came up with those lines about “Big eyes, big soul/big heart, no control/but all she got to give is tiny love.” I loved the chorus of that song. I had always loved it.
DAISY: Billy listened to me. The whole way to the restaurant, as he drove, he was listening. For what felt like the first time since I met him.
BILLY: If I had a great line like that, and someone else pretended it was theirs, I’d be pretty angry.
She made more sense to me after that. And, to be honest, it was harder to tell myself she had no talent. Because she clearly did. It was a real reality check. That voice that whispers in the back of your head, You have been acting like an asshole.
DAISY: It made me laugh. That to Billy I needed a reason to want an equal say in the art I created. I said, “Cool, man. Now that you dig it, maybe you can stop being such a dickhead.”
BILLY: Daisy could really give you the grief you deserved. And if you took it in the spirit it was intended…she wasn’t so bad.
DAISY: We sat down at the counter and I ordered for both of us and then put the menus away. I just wanted to put Billy in his place a little bit. I wanted him to have to deal with me being in charge.
But of course, he couldn’t let it go, he said, “I was going to order the hickory burger, anyway.” I think I’ve rolled my eyes about five thousand more times in my life just on account of Billy Dunne.
BILLY: After we both ordered, I decided to try a little game. I said, “How about I ask you a question, you ask me a question? No one can dodge the answers.”
DAISY: I told him I was an open book.
BILLY: I said, “How many pills do you take a day?”
She looked around and fiddled with her straw. And then she turned to me and said, “No one can dodge the answer?”
And I said, “We have to be able to tell the truth to each other, to really be honest about ourselves. Otherwise, how can we ever write anything?”
DAISY: He was open to writing with me. That’s what I took from that.
BILLY: I asked the question again. “How many pills do you take a day?”
She looked down and then back up at me and she said, “I don’t know.”
I was skeptical but she put her hands up and said, “No, really. That’s the truth. I don’t know. I don’t keep track.”
I said, “Don’t you think that’s a problem?”
She said, “It’s my turn, isn’t it?”
DAISY: I said, “What makes Camila so great that you can’t write anything that isn’t about her?”
He was quiet for a really long time.
I said, “C’mon, now, you made me answer. You can’t weasel out of it.”
He said, “Would you wait a minute? I’m not trying to weasel out of anything. I’m trying to think about my answer.”
After another minute or two, he said, “I don’t think I am the person Camila believes I am. But I want to be that person so bad. And if I just stick with her, if I work every day to be the guy she sees, I’ve got the best chance at coming close to it.”
BILLY: Daisy looked at me and said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
And I said, “What did I do to make you mad this time?”
And she said, “There’s just as much to hate about you as there is to like about you. And that’s annoying.”
DAISY: Then he said, “It’s my turn.”
I said, “Out with it then.”
BILLY: “When are you going to quit the pills?”
DAISY: I said, “Why are you so obsessed with the goddamn pills?”
BILLY: I told her the truth. I said, “My father was a drunk who was never there for Graham and me. I never wanted to be that way. And then the first thing I do, my first act as a father, was to get all messed up in all the shit you’re messed up in—even heroin, too, I’m afraid—and I let my daughter down. Even missed her birth. I turned out to be exactly what I’ve always hated. If it wasn’t for Camila, I think I’d still be that way. I think I would have made all my own nightmares come true. That’s the kind of guy I am.”
DAISY: I said, “It’s like some of us are chasing after our nightmares the way other people chase dreams.”
He said, “That’s a song, right there.”
BILLY: It wasn’t behind me. My addiction. I kept hoping it would feel like it was. Like I didn’t need to keep looking over my shoulder all the time. But that doesn’t really exist. At least not for me. It’s a fight you keep fighting, some times are easier than others. Daisy made it harder. She just did.
DAISY: I was paying the price for the parts of himself that he didn’t like.
BILLY: She said, “If I was a teetotaler you’d like me more, huh?”
And I said, “I’d like to be around you more. Yeah, probably.”
And Daisy said, “Well, you can just forget that. I don’t change for anybody.”
DAISY: I finished my burger and threw down some money and I got up to go. Billy said, “What are you doing?”
And I said, “We’re going back to Teddy’s. We’re gonna write that song about chasing our nightmares.”
BILLY: I grabbed my keys and walked out after her.
DAISY: On the way back to Teddy’s, Billy was singing me this melody he’d had in his head. We were at a red light and he was tapping the steering wheel and humming along.
BILLY: I had a Bo Diddley beat I was thinking of. Something I wanted to try.
DAISY: He said, “Can you work with that?”
I said I could work with anything. So when we got back to the pool house, I started sketching some ideas out. And he did, too. After about a half hour, I had stuff to show him but he said he needed more time. I kept hanging around, waiting for him to be done.
BILLY: She was pacing around me. She wanted to show me what she was writing. I finally had to say, “Will you get the fuck out of here?”
And I…on account of how rude I’d been to her in the past I realized I needed to be clear that I just meant it the same way I’d say it to Graham or Karen, you know? I said, “Please, will you get the fuck out of here? Go get a donut or something.”
She said, “I ate a burger already.” That’s when I realized Daisy only ate one meal a day.
DAISY: I picked the lock to Teddy’s house, borrowed his girlfriend Yasmine’s bathing suit and a towel, and went for a swim. I was in there long enough to prune. And then I went back in, put the bathing suit in the wash, took a shower, and went back into the pool house and Billy was still sitting there, writing.
BILLY: She told me what she did and I said, “That’s weird, Daisy. That you borrowed Yasmine’s bathing suit.” And Daisy just shrugged.
She said, “Would you have rather I skinny-dipped?”
DAISY: I took his pages from him and I gave him mine.
BILLY: She had a lot of imagery of darkness, running into darkness, chasing darkness.
DAISY: When it came to the structure of the verses, his were better than mine. But he didn’t have a really fun chorus yet and I thought that I did. I showed him the part I’d written I liked the most and I sang it to him with his melody he’d given me. I could tell on his face, he knew it sounded good.
BILLY: We went back and forth a lot on that song. Just hours of talking it out, playing with the melodies on the guitar.
DAISY: I don’t think any of our original lines made it into the final version.
BILLY: But when we sang it—when we worked out the lyrics and who should sing wh
at, and refined the melody of the vocal and that interplay between those two things—we started singing it together and fine-tuning it. You know what? I’ll tell you, it was a great little song.
DAISY: Teddy came in the door and he said, “What the hell are you two still doing here? It’s almost midnight.”
BILLY: I did not realize how late it was.
DAISY: Teddy said, “Also, did you break into my house and use Yasmine’s bathing suit?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “I’d love it if you didn’t do that again.”
BILLY: I was going to leave then but I thought, You know what, let’s show Teddy what we’ve come up with. So Teddy sat down on the couch and we sat across from him.
I was saying, “This isn’t the final” and “We just came up with this.” And all that.
DAISY: I said, “Stop, Billy. It’s a good song. No disclaimers.”
BILLY: We played it for Teddy and when we were done, he said, “This is what you two come up with when you’re on the same team?”
And we looked at each other and I said, “Uh, yeah?”
And he said, “Well, then, I’m a genius.” He sat there laughing, real proud of himself.
DAISY: It was like we all agreed not to discuss that Billy needed Teddy’s approval like a son needs his father’s.
BILLY: I left Teddy’s that night and I rushed home because it was late and I was feeling guilty about it. I walked in the door and the kids were asleep and Camila was sitting in the rocking chair watching the TV on low volume and she looked up at me. I started apologizing and she said, “You’re sober, right?”
And I said, “Yeah, of course. I was just writing and I lost track of time.”
And that was it. Camila didn’t care that I hadn’t called her. She just cared that I hadn’t relapsed. That was all.
CAMILA: It’s hard to explain, because I really do think it defies reason. But I knew him well enough to know that he could be trusted. And I knew that no matter what mistakes he made—no matter what mistakes I might make, too—that we would be fine.
I don’t know if I would have believed in that type of security before I had it. Before I chose to give it to Billy. And by giving it to Billy, I gave it to myself, too. But saying to someone, “No matter what you do, we’re not over…” I don’t know. Something about that relaxed me.
BILLY: All those weeks that Daisy and I worked on songs together, I’d work as late as I needed. I’d stay out with Daisy as long as we needed. And every night when I came home, Camila was in that chair. She’d get up when I got home and I’d sit down and then she’d sit in my lap and put her head on my chest and say, “How was your day?”
I’d tell her the highlights and I’d hear about her day and I’d hear about the girls. And I’d rock us back and forth until we went to sleep.
One night, I picked her up out of the rocking chair and I put her in bed and I said, “You don’t always have to wait up for me.”
She was half-asleep but she said, “I want to. I like to.”
And you know…no crowd cheering, no magazine cover ever made me feel even remotely as important as Camila. And I think the same goes for her. I really do. She liked having a man who wrote songs about her and carried her to bed.
GRAHAM: When Billy was off writing with Daisy, it was the first time that the rest of us could be composing on our own.
KAREN: “Aurora” was a great song with a great spine to it and we all had a lot of fun building it out.
Billy tended to want a more spartan keyboard. But I wanted to get into more atmospheric, lush sounds. So when we started working on “Aurora,” I came in with those sustained roots and fifths. I kept some of the melodic chords broken up a bit, to keep it moving. But I was pedaling a lot of the bass notes. Shifted from staccato to legato.
And because the keys shifted, that meant Pete shifted the bass a bit. Now it’s his bass that is keeping your foot tapping, the rhythm guitar is keeping you going.
EDDIE: I wanted to do something a little faster, a little more propulsive. I was really into the Kinks’ new album. I wanted to move more in that direction. I thought Warren should hit harder on the drums, really using the drum and bass as counter-rhythms. Plus, I had this idea of a simple drumbeat for the intro.
We had it sounding really good.
GRAHAM: When Billy checked in at the studio whatever day it was, he said he wanted to hear what we had so far on “Aurora.”
EDDIE: We played it for him. I mean, we weren’t set up in the studio yet. Hadn’t recorded anything. But we got in there and played it out for him.
BILLY: I never would have come up with what they came up with in a million years. I could barely even keep a neutral face as I was listening. It felt odd and wrong and uncomfortable. Like putting on someone else’s shoes.
Every bone in my body was saying, This is not me. This is not right. I need to fix this now.
GRAHAM: I could tell he hated it.
KAREN: Oh, he hated it. [Laughs] He definitely hated it.
ROD: Teddy took him aside and they went for a drive.
BILLY: Teddy made me get in his car and we drove to get lunch or maybe it was dinner. And I was lost in thought, just hearing my own song being ruined over and over in my head.
I started talking the minute we sat down and Teddy put his hand up to stop me. He insisted on ordering first. He ordered basically everything fried on the menu. If it was battered, Teddy would eat it.
Once the waitress left, he said, “Okay, go ahead.”
I said, “Do you think it sounds good?”
And he said, “Yes, I do.”
I said, “You don’t think it should be a bit less…congested?”
And Teddy said, “They are talented musicians. Just like you. Let them show you what you can’t see in your own stuff. Let them lay down all the tracks. And then you and I will go in and pull back where we need to and sweeten and all that. If we have to have everybody come in one at a time and overdub, then we do that. We can change the whole song piece by piece if we have to. But as the spine of the song, yes, I think they are doing a great job.”
I thought about it. And I could feel my chest was tight. But I said, “All right. I trust you.”
And he said, “That’s good. But trust them, too.”
ROD: When Billy came back in, he had very simple notes. All good stuff.
KAREN: Billy changed an octave, wanted me to jump from a one-five repetition to a one-four-five. But in general, he was very supportive.
GRAHAM: The early take of that song is one we never would have come to if it had all gone Billy’s way. By having us all involved, we were evolving.
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.
ARTIE SNYDER: 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.
ARTIE SNYDER: 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.
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