I looked over at Daisy, she was coming up off the diving board. She had a glass in her hand and she dropped it right there on the side of the pool. I watched her step onto the broken glass, not realizing it was under her feet.
Rod: Daisy’s feet starting bleeding.
Simone: There was blood mixing with the pool water on the concrete. And Daisy didn’t even notice. She just kept walking, talking to somebody else.
Daisy: I couldn’t feel the cuts on my feet. I couldn’t feel much of anything, I don’t think.
Simone: In that moment, I thought, She’s going to be the girl bleeding in a beautiful dress until it kills her.
I felt … lost, sad, depressed, sick. I felt really hopeless but also like I didn’t have the luxury of giving up. Like I was going to have to fight for her—fight for her against her—until I lost. Because there was no winning. I didn’t see how I could win the war.
Billy: I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t stay because when I looked at Daisy, wet and bleeding and out of it and half-near falling down, I did not think, Thank God I stopped using.
I thought, She knows how to have fun.
Rod: I was getting Daisy a towel to dry off when I saw Billy turn and leave. I’d driven us there so I wasn’t quite sure where he was going. I tried to catch his eye but he didn’t see me until the last moment, when he went around the corner. He just gave me a nod. And I understood. I was thankful he’d come up with me in the first place.
He knew how to take care of himself and that’s what he was doing.
Billy: I told Rod I was leaving and made sure he was all right to take a cab home because I’d driven us over. He was really supportive. He understood why I needed to leave.
When I got home, I got in bed right next to Camila, so thankful to be there. But I couldn’t sleep. I kept wondering what I’d be doing that very moment if I’d taken the whiskey out of that man’s hand. If I’d poured it down my throat.
Would I be laughing and playing a song for everybody? Would I be skinny-dipping with a whole bunch of strangers? Would I be puking my guts out watching somebody strap up and shoot heroin?
Instead, I was laying in the darkest quiet, listening to my wife snore.
The thing is, I’m a person who survives despite his instincts. My instincts said to run toward the chaos. And my better brain sent me home to my woman.
Daisy: I don’t remember seeing Billy there. I don’t remember seeing Rod. I don’t know how I made it to my bed.
Billy: I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep that night. So I got up out of bed and I wrote a song.
Rod: Billy comes into the studio the next day. Everybody else is there, ready to get to recording. I’ve even got Daisy there, relatively sober, drinking a coffee.
Daisy: I felt bad. I did not mean to blow off the recording session, obviously.
Why did I hurt myself like that? I can’t explain it. I wish I could. I hated it about myself. I hated it about myself and I kept doing it and then I hated myself more. There are no good answers about this.
Rod: Billy comes in and he shows us all a song he wrote. “Impossible Woman.”
I said, “You wrote this last night?”
He said, “Yeah.”
Billy: Daisy reads it and goes, “Cool.”
Graham: It was clear, from the feeling in the room, that none of us, not even Daisy and Billy, were going to acknowledge it was about Daisy.
Billy: It’s not about Daisy. It’s about when you’re sober, there are things you can’t touch, things you can’t have.
Karen: After Graham and I heard Billy play it for the first time, I said to Graham, “That song is …”
And Graham just goes, “Yup.”
Daisy: It was a great damn song.
Warren: Didn’t care then, barely care now.
Karen: “Dancing barefoot in the snow/cold can’t touch her, high or low.” That’s Daisy Jones.
Billy: I decided to write a song about a woman that felt like sand through your fingers, like you could never really catch her. As an allegory for the things I couldn’t have, couldn’t do.
Daisy: I said, “This song is for us to sing?”
Billy said, “No, I think you should give it a shot on your own. I wrote it for your register.”
I said, “It seems more obvious that a man would be singing this about a woman.”
Billy said, “It’s more interesting if a woman is singing it. It gives it a haunting kind of quality.”
I said, “All right, I’ll take a stab at it.”
I took some time with it while everybody was lining out their parts. A few days later, I went in. I listened as everybody laid their tracks down. Just trying to find a way into it.
When it was my turn to get in there, I gave it my best. I tried to make it feel a little sad, maybe. Like I missed this woman. I was thinking, Maybe this woman is my mother, maybe this woman is my lost sister, maybe there is something I need from this woman. You know?
I thought, It’s wistful, it’s ethereal. That kind of a thing. But I was doing take after take and I could tell it wasn’t working.
And I kept looking to everybody, thinking, Somebody get me out of this mess. I’m flailing over here. And I didn’t know what to do. And I started getting angry.
Karen: Daisy has absolutely no formal training. She does not know the names of chords, she does not know various vocal techniques. If what Daisy does naturally doesn’t work, then you have to take Daisy off the song.
Daisy: I’m just hoping somebody saves me from myself. I say I want to take five. Teddy suggests I go for a walk, clear my head. I walk around the block. But I’m only making it worse because I just keep thinking I can’t do it and Of course I can’t do it and all that. And I finally just give up. I get in my car and I drive away. I couldn’t deal with it, so I left.
Billy: I wrote the song for her. I mean I wrote it for her to sing. So that made me mad. Her giving up like that.
Obviously, I understood why she was frustrated. I mean, Daisy is shockingly talented. Like it will shock you, to be near it. Her talent. But she didn’t know how to control it. She couldn’t call on it, you know? She just had to hope it would be there.
But giving up wasn’t cool. Especially not after trying for, you know, a couple of hours, tops. That’s the problem with people who don’t have to work for things. They don’t know how to work for things.
Daisy: That night, somebody knocks on my door. I was with Simone making dinner. I open the door and there’s Billy Dunne.
Billy: I went there with the express purpose of getting her to sing the damn song. Did I want to go back to the Chateau Marmont? No, I did not. But that’s what I had to do, so I did it.
Daisy: He sits me down and Simone is in the kitchen making Harvey Wallbangers and she offers Billy one.
Billy: And immediately Daisy blocks me and says, “No!” As if I was going to take the drink from Simone’s hand.
Daisy: I was embarrassed that Simone has offered it to him because I knew he already felt like I was a scummy boozehound drug addict. And if Billy thought I was going to knock him off the wagon, I was going to do everything in my power to make sure that wasn’t true.
Billy: It … surprised me. She had actually been listening to me.
Daisy: Billy said to me, “You have to sing this song.” I told him that I just didn’t have the right voice for it. We talked back and forth for a while, about what the song meant and whether there was a way into it for me and finally Billy just said that it was about me. That he had written it about me. That I’m the impossible woman. “She’s blues dressed up like rock ’n’ roll/untouchable, she’ll never fold.” That was me. And something kind of clicked in my head.