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?”
DAISY: Even then, I wasn’t sure if Billy and I were having the same conversation.
BILLY: She was great at wordplay. She was great at flipping the meaning of things, of undercutting sentiment. I loved that about what she was doing and I told her that.
DAISY: The harder I worked as a songwriter, the longer I worked at it, the better I got. Not in any linear way, really. More like zigzags. But I was getting better, getting really good. And I knew that. I knew that when I showed the song to him. But knowing you’re good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that. I really believe that.
Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror.
BILLY: “This Could Get Ugly” was her idea, her execution and it was…excellent.
She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself. And that’s what Daisy did, with that song. At least for me.
I could do nothing but praise her for it. I didn’t change a single word.
EDDIE: When they came into the studio with “This Could Get Ugly,” I thought, Great, another song that has got no room for me to try my own thing on.
I didn’t like who this was all turning me into. I’m not a bitter person. In almost every other situation in my life, I’m not this guy, you know what I’m saying? But I was getting so sick of it. Going into work every day feeling like a second-class citizen. That stuff messes with you. I don’t care who you are. It messes with you.
I said to Pete, I said, “Second-class citizen. First-class resort.”
KAREN: It definitely became a club that we weren’t in. Daisy and Billy. Even the word down from Runner Records was keep Daisy and Billy happy. Keep Daisy and Billy stable.
WARREN: Daisy was always skipping out on stuff she didn’t want to do. She was always coming in sauced. But everybody was acting like she was the goose that laid the golden egg.
DAISY: I honestly thought I was balancing all of it fine. I wasn’t. But I really thought I was.
KAREN: I had thought she had the pills under control and I realized at some point while we were recording that album that she’d just learned to hide it better.
ROD: Billy and Daisy would seem like they were getting along like a house on fire and then Daisy would be late for something or she’d be outside with somebody and nobody could find her and Billy would get pissed.
EDDIE: Daisy and Billy would be outside on the sidewalk, thinking we can’t hear them, and they’d be screaming at each other about something or other.
KAREN: Billy got very angry when Daisy slacked off.
BILLY: I don’t think Daisy and I fought very much back then. Maybe normal stuff. Just as much as I’d fight with Graham or Warren.