“I knew I should’ve been happy. I made something I was proud of. But when the drugs wore off, and the adrenaline faded, all I could hear was my mother’s.
It seems like Daisy and Billy’s banishment to Isolation Island is gonna go down as both the best and worst thing to ever happen to The Six. “We must have written eight or nine songs in the first couple weeks,” present-day Daisy says in Daisy Jones & The Six Episode 6 (“Whatever Gets You Thru The Night”). We see the two songwriters thick as thieves, huddling over crumpled lyric sheets torn from composition books, laughing about in-jokes, writing guitar parts, and – forever – bickering. (“Not every song needs a bridge!”) It’s intimate though, separate, and the rest of the band learns the arrangements whenever the two of them reveal their creations at Sound City Studios. “Did this concern you?” his interviewer asks Graham in the present. “Not really. Not yet, anyway…”
The thing is, the band, their producer, everyone in the recording studio – they knew the material was fantastic. Or as Karen puts it in the present, “Great. Fucking. Songs.” And they weren’t going to stop the dance as long as Billy and Daisy were inventing new steps. “Here’s how confident Teddy was,” Warren tells us with a swig from his longneck. “Before we even finished recording, he called in a favor at Rolling Stone.” And this is where Jonah Berg (Nick Pupo) reappears, who we saw for two seconds in the pilot episode. He was a cub music journalist when he got the Six feature assignment, but in the future he’s the author of The Rise of Daisy Jones. And Berg has his own sense of the electricity crackling during the Aurora sessions. Every song, he says, is a coded message. “From Billy to Daisy, Daisy to Billy.”
Notice who isn’t on that sonic group chat. Camila has been raising their daughter Julia largely on her own while her husband Billy’s in the studio and off scribbling with Daisy. Not only that, she tells Karen, but she feels excluded from the project, from making it together like they had before. Camila’s on her own Isolation Island, while Billy and Daisy are tooling his Mustang to the beach at night – “This is new for me; this is new for me too, Daisy” – and ultimately hesitating before her door. “I looked in that room, and all I saw was temptation,” Billy says in the present as the camera takes in Daisy’s wet bar, but she says it wasn’t drugs or booze he was talking about.
A day of studio time is lost when Daisy blows off recording vocals in favor of partying her face off at the Chateau Marmont, and that leads to major acrimony and an icky form of argumentative, very public sexual tension between her and Billy.
