I had to admit I saw where Teddy was coming from.
I said to Billy, “If Teddy is trying to bring in a different demographic, Daisy makes sense.”
Billy: Teddy wasn’t letting up. Daisy Daisy Daisy. Even Graham started in on me. I said, “Fine. If this girl Daisy wants to do it, then we’ll try it.”
Rod: Teddy was a good producer. He knew people in town were just starting to get excited about Daisy Jones. If this song turned out well, it could make a splash.
Daisy: I had heard of The Six, obviously, being on the same label and everything. And I’d heard their singles on the radio.
I hadn’t bothered to listen to their debut album that much but when Teddy played me SevenEightNine, I was blown away. I loved that album. I must have listened to “Hold Your Breath” about ten times in a row.
I loved Billy’s voice. There was something so plaintive about it. So vulnerable. I thought, This is the voice of a man who’s seen things. I thought it was so evocative to sound broken the way he did. I didn’t have that. I sounded like a cool new pair of jeans and Billy sounded like the pair you’ve had for years.
I could see the potential of how we could really complement each other. So I kept listening to their cut of “Honeycomb,” and I could feel something missing. I read the lyrics and I … I really got that song.
This felt like my shot to offer something up, to add something. I was excited to get in the studio because I thought I could really be of use.
Billy: We were all there in the studio that day when Daisy came in and I thought everybody but me and Teddy should have gone home.
Daisy: I was going to wear one of my Halstons. And then I woke up late and lost my keys and couldn’t find my pill bottle and the morning got away from me.
Karen: When she showed up, she was wearing a men’s button-down shirt as a dress. That was it. I remember thinking, Where are her pants?
Eddie: Daisy Jones was the most gorgeous woman I ever laid eyes on. She had those big eyes. Those super-full lips. And she was as tall as I was. She looked like gazelle.
Warren: Daisy had no ass, no tits. A carpenter’s dream as they call ’em. Flat as a board, easy to nail. Well, I don’t know if she was easy to nail. Probably not. The way men reacted to her, she held all the cards and she knew it. When Pete saw her, he might as well have let his tongue roll out of his mouth.
Karen: She was so pretty that I worried I was staring at her. But then I thought, Hell, she’s probably been stared at her whole life. She probably thinks looking means staring.
Billy: I saw her and I introduced myself, and I said, “Glad to have you here. Thanks for helping us out.” I asked if she wanted to talk about the song a bit, practice what she was gonna lay down.
Daisy: I’d been working on it all night. I’d been in the studio with Teddy a few days before, listening to it over and over. I had a good idea of what I wanted to do.
Billy: Daisy just said, “No, thanks.” Like that. Like I had nothing of value to offer.
Rod: She went right into the booth and started warming up.
Karen: I said, “Guys, we don’t all need to be here watching her.” But nobody moved.
Daisy: I finally had to say, “Can I have some room to breathe, please?”
Billy: Finally everybody started funneling out except me, Teddy, and Artie.
Artie Snyder: I miked her up in one of the iso booths. We did a couple test runs and for whatever reason, the mike wasn’t working.
It took me about forty-five minutes to get that mike going. She was standing there, singing into it on and off, going, “Testing, testing, one two three.” Helping me out. I could feel Billy getting more and more tense. But Daisy was so calm about it. I said, “I’m sorry about this,” and she said, “It takes as long as it takes and you’ll get it when you get it.”
Daisy always did right by me. She always made it seem like she cared about how my day was going. Not a lot of people did that.
Daisy: I had read the lyrics to the song what felt like a million times. I had my own idea of how I wanted it to go.
Billy sang it in this sort of pleading way. I thought the way he sang it made it seem like he wasn’t sure he believed his own promise. And I loved that. I thought that made it so interesting. So I had this plan to sing my part like I wanted to believe him but maybe deep down inside I didn’t. I thought that gave the song some layers.
When we got the mike working—you know, Artie’s giving me the signal to start and Billy and Teddy are watching me—I got up into the mike and I sang it like I didn’t believe Billy was going to buy a house near the honeycomb, that it wasn’t really ever gonna happen. That was my angle on it.
During the refrain, the lyrics were originally “The life we want will wait for us/We will live to see the lights coming off the bay/And you will hold me, you will hold me, you will hold me/until that day.”
I sang it straight through on the first go-around but the second time I sang it, I changed it up a bit. I said, “Will the life we want wait for us?/ Will we live to see the lights coming off the bay?/Will you hold me, will you hold me, will you hold me until that day?”
I sang them as questions as opposed to statements.
Billy didn’t even let me finish before he popped up and hit the talkback.
Billy: She sang the words wrong. It didn’t make sense to have her keep going with the words wrong.
Artie Snyder: Billy would never have allowed someone to interrupt him like that. I was genuinely surprised when he did that.
Billy: The song was about a happy ending after turmoil. I didn’t think doubt worked in that context.
Karen: Billy wrote that song trying to convince himself that this future he saw with Camila was a sure thing. But he and Camila both knew Billy could relapse at any moment.
I mean, the first month he was out of rehab, he gained ten pounds because he was eating chocolate bars in the middle of the night. And then when he stopped doing that, there was all the woodworking. You’d go over to Billy and Camila’s and Billy would be obsessing over some mahogany dining room table he was trying to make and there were all these shitty dining chairs he’d nailed together.
And don’t get me started on the shopping. Oh, and the running was maybe the worst of it. For about two months, Billy would run however many miles a day. He’d be wearing those little dolphin shorts and muscle tanks bobbing down the street.
Rod: Billy was trying. This was a guy who made so many things seem easy. But he was trying very hard to stay sober. And you could see the strain on him.
Karen: Billy was writing songs trying to tell himself he had got it all under control, that decades out he’ll still have his sobriety and his wife and his family.
And in about two minutes of singing, Daisy pulled the tablecloth from under the dishes.
Rod: Daisy did a few more takes and it really seemed easy for her. She didn’t have to work for it. She wasn’t bleeding for every note.
But when Billy left the studio, I could tell he was pretty tense. I said, “Don’t take work home with you.” But the problem wasn’t that he had brought work home with him. It was that he had brought home into work.
Karen: “Honeycomb” used to be a song about security, and it became a song about insecurity.
Billy: That night, I told Camila about how Daisy sang it, with the questions.