Daisy Jones & the Six: How the Cast Became a Real Rock Band
The post Daisy Jones & the Six: How the Cast Became a Real Rock Band appeared first on Consequence.
When you watch Prime Video’s Daisy Jones & the Six, it’s easy to get whisked away into the world of 1970s rock and roll, and a huge part of that is that the actors cast to play the titular band actually came together as a band, learning every song and playing them all live. “I think after we’d essentially been rehearsing for like a year, after our last stint in band rehearsal, we all kind of got to a point where we were going, ‘You know, I think we got there,'” star Riley Keough tells Consequence with a laugh.
The series, based on the book by Taylor Jenkins Reid, focuses on the rise and fall of the titular fictional band: Keough as Daisy Jones (lead vocals), Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne (lead vocals, guitar), Suki Waterhouse as Karen Sirko (keyboards), Will Harrison as Graham Dunne (guitar), Josh Whitehouse as Eddie Roundtree (bass), and Sebastian Chacon as Warren Rojas (drums).
Claflin says that during “the first cast dinner that we organized ourselves, there was that moment where you meet the other people you were about to be working with for the next two years or whatever, and there was just a genuine ease to everyone. And I think that in that moment I was, ‘Okay, we’re doing something quite special here.’ Like whoever cast this is a genius, is what I’m trying to say — pulling these different personalities from different walks of life, from different sides of the planet, bringing us all together and finding that not one of us has an ego and not one of us felt better or more slighted than anyone else. I think we all just were very supportive and excited to be here.”
Daisy Jones & the Six, the band, has only one full album to their name, featuring songs created by Blake Mills, with production support from Tony Berg and contributions by Marcus Mumford, Phoebe Bridgers, and Jackson Browne. Titled Aurora, the album is now available for streaming and purchase, and the cast plays on every single track.
Keough says “I had never played guitar, never sang, never recorded an album. So the whole thing was new to me,” but every cast member who came to Daisy Jones came as a relative novice in their respective instruments.
“We all started very on a very rudimentary level,” says Waterhouse. “Even those of us that do play music, the idea of learning 12 songs and being able to play them note-perfect to be filmed… They wanted to film it in a very roaming way that meant that you never knew when you were gonna be on camera. So we all started at the beginning.”
Prior to Daisy Jones, Waterhouse had played the guitar and other instruments, but not her character’s designated keyboards — which she said she would have chosen to play anyway for the show, if she’d had the option. “I actually would’ve picked keyboards because to be able to start from scratch and have that much training, it is something that you’d only ever have gotten to do when you were a kid. This was like being able to relive all the lessons that you never took when you were a kid and actually develop a skill. And I play keys on stage when I do shows for my own music now. So that’s such a huge gift.”
Whitehouse says that he never anticipated having to play a ’70s rock star over the course of his career, “but I was always open to it. It’s one of the funny things of being an actor, I suppose, is you just never know what you’re gonna end up doing. I picked up a whole new instrument, really. I always thought I could play bass because I could play the guitar, but, you know, that’s not true. There’s a lot more going on, and it was great to have somebody really guide me through that.”
To get into rock band shape, everyone had their individual coaches — for example, Chacon worked with “my homie Kane Ritchotte. We worked extensively alone, like really perfecting like our skills with our individual instruments, and then after quite some time we came together and we started working together and that’s when it really opened up. And like, we all suddenly realized like, we sound pretty good.”
Says Waterhouse, “There were little moments where our producers would come in after a month, two months, and just start crying because things finally felt like they were coming together.”
Playing a massive factor in the project was the timing of the production: All the actors were cast prior to March 2020, and had begun their musical training when lockdown began. “The pandemic kind of did us a favor in a way, in that we had an extra year and a half to learn our parts, learn our instruments,” Whitehouse says. “We had essentially two-three month blocks on either side of the pandemic where we were able to rehearse together, and so in the second block, where we were performing for that three months, it was like we came back in fully charged and we all knew our parts. It was like all of a sudden this time around we’re coming in and stepping on stage and we know the songs, but we’ve never played them together in person before.”
“It was all new again because we’d been apart for so long, and I’ve been playing alone in a basement in Brooklyn, and then suddenly like, ‘Oh my God, we’re a band again! This is crazy.’ Like, I forgot how good these songs sound, you know?” says Chacon.
Daisy Jones & the Six (Prime Video)
For Chacon, the band really started feeling like a band when, after their post-pandemic reunion, “we all got in front of the whole production crew and the people at Amazon, and we actually played a live show. We played the whole album. There was no backing track or anything and we’re like, yeah, we are a band. We can play all of this. You know, it’s real.”
Says Whitehouse of that night, “it was very intimidating, but it was really fun and a very, very useful experience, heading forwards into the show.”
For Claflin, making Daisy Jones was an education, because “my knowledge of 1970s music was non-existent prior to this. So I think every recording session turned into a history lesson. Tony Berg was the one helping me record all my stuff and he quite literally walked me through the history of music, and gave me references and guidance into what sort of vibe they were looking for, what I should be looking out for. We also were like very fortunate enough to kind of be sort of flies on the wall and witness Blake Mills and Tony Berg write a couple of songs in real time. And that was the best sort of insight to help to inform our characters’ relationship.”
The show includes multiple scenes in which Daisy and Billy are collaborating on the songs eventually featured on the band’s one and only album, Aurora, for which Keough says she and Claflin received “versions [of the songs] from our guitar teacher, or from Blake, that would be the starting point of that particular song.”
Adds Claflin, “Sometimes a scene written in the script would say, ‘And they argue.’ And you’re like, well, what would we be arguing about? What’s the language we would be using? It was a huge journey that we all had to go on really. But I think we all did the best we could.”
Embodying a rock star like this, Claflin says, taught him a lot about music, even just on a fundamental level. “I never really listened to music understanding that it was someone pouring out their heart or their soul. I think I’d always just heard songs and imagined people just made up certain aspects of their life in order to make a better song,” he says.
He then mentions a clip of Fleetwood Mac performing the Stevie Nicks-written “Silver Springs,” which he’d shown to Keough early on in the production process, telling her to “watch this moment where Stevie Nicks turns to Lindsay Buckingham singing [“You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you”]. And you feel, you see it in her eyes, the burning hatred that she may have had for Lindsay in that moment, or whatever it was.” He laughs. “It really takes you on a journey.”
For Keough, though, she found the experience to be a zen one. “I’m sure other people have different experiences, but for me, our job is very chaotic as actors. And I found the recording process to be very peaceful and personal.”
In between takes, Whitehouse says, the group would come up with their own riffs and ideas musically: “We were making stuff up — I was taking little voice notes of like, baselines I was coming up with while we were jamming or like just having ideas. I’ve been trying to make an album out of it since.”
Chacon adds that “we would be playing like constantly, like so annoying working on set with a bunch of musicians who will not shut up, you know? Yeah.”
“They were constantly trying to get quiet,” Whitehouse says. “‘Please just stop just for five minutes.’”
Chacon’s reply: “I’m sitting in a drum kit, man, please take these sticks from me.”
Because of how much time has passed since they first began working on the project, the idea that people will now be able to hear the songs they’ve been working on feels surreal to members of the cast. “We have had these songs in our minds for three years now,” Chacon says. “Any musician has a song in their minds for a long time before it comes out and have other people interact with it and love it. It seems strange almost. Like this is real, like people actually heard this stuff that has been in our brains.”
“Yeah, it’s crazy to kind of disassociate it from being just our private little thing,” says Whitehouse. “But I learned so much from the show about music, about performance.”
And who knows, an encore isn’t impossible to imagine, at least according to Chacon and Whitehouse. “Why don’t we do that right now?” Chacon laughs, when I ask about the possibility of the band reuniting in 10 years’ time.
“Yeah, we were we were talking about going into a studio, to just like see what we actually made together at some point, would be a really fun thing to do,” Whitehouse says. “See what comes out.”
Daisy Jones & the Six premieres Friday, March 3rd on Prime Video with the first three episodes. Subsequent episodes roll out weekly.
Daisy Jones & the Six: How the Cast Became a Real Rock Band
Liz Shannon Miller
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