Photo by Alexa Ondrush
On their third full-length, The Rubber Teeth Talk, Kelley Dugan and Mina Walker opted to record in a live band setting rather than having each member record their own parts and piece everything together like a puzzle upon completion. While Daisy the Great’s core sound hasn’t changed, there’s a new energy to the alternative pop-rock songs boasting tight harmonies and wonderfully memorable lyrics. The band’s early sound, with its polished, almost theatrical flair reminiscent of the vibrant, performance-driven energy you might expect from two acting majors from NYC’s Tisch School of the Arts, has given way to songs that have a mid-90s MTV feel evoking the spirit of Veruca Salt, Letters to Cleo and That Dog which should help expand the listening base. Dugan and Walker checked in to talk about the band’s evolution and their approach to songwriting.
Are you the type of musicians who follow a plan when writing and recording or do you allow for improvisation?
MINA: It really depends on the song that we’re writing. A lot of times we’ll just be playing chords and we’ll have our notebooks open and we’ll just be singing and seeing what fits in. A lot of times, it’ll actually be one of us humming some gibberish and then the other person will hear words in the gibberish and be like, “You actually said something really brilliant. I know you think you’re not saying words, but I heard words.” We build a whole thing off of that.
I watched the Beatles Get Back documentary during the pandemic and was amazed at how, even back then, they were filming everything. Do you film stuff when you’re in the studio? In 30 years, will there be a Daisy the Great documentary?
KELLEY: Definitely. We had a camcorder and were filming stuff as we made the record. Also, like everyone, we have our phones too but we were trying to use a camcorder to make it feel a little bit more personal. We didn’t have phones everywhere. I have so much footage and, honestly, it’s overwhelming. I want to make a documentary so bad but it’s going to take me so long.
MINA: It’s okay. In 30 or 40 years, we can just give all the footage to someone and they can make it. You don’t have to make your own documentary. We’re just creating the archives. I wish we took more videos of writing. Me and Kelley have been writing this album, and then we wrote more of it with the band over the last 2 or 3 years. But, sometimes if there’s a camera on you, you act differently. You want to record everything but you also want the process to be genuine.
KELLEY: We also have so many voice memos. So, maybe for the documentary, they can use the voice memo and then use a picture or a video from the camcorder.
MINA: That’s very “murder doc” to me (laughs)
You could find people to play you and turn it into a reenactment!
MINA: I’m a big biopic head. I love every terrible biopic out there. I love things that seem like they’re a biopic and they’re not. I love a true story.
You did a short tour before the album came out. Was the record supposed to come out sooner or was it intentional?
KELLEY: We were looking at our year ahead and we really wanted to tour because it’s been a while. Last year, we went on tour opening for The Kooks in the spring but, otherwise, we were really heads down and focused on making the record. In the time leading up to the release, we were making a lot of music videos and finalizing things for the record, but we had the ability to tour and we really wanted to. So, we made a tour around the album’s lead single, “Ballerina,” which we’ve been playing on the road for a while. It felt really exciting to be able to put the single out and then go and tour it and give the song its own moment because we’ve been waiting so long to put it out.
MINA: That tour was kind of a ramp up into the album. It was a moment for us to play some of the last record and some things that have come out in the last couple of years. We knew once the new album came out, we’d be very album focused. So, we were happy to have that tour, that last moment to play a lot of songs and play some new songs. We really liked playing some songs that weren’t out yet. It was a nice opportunity to tease a little bit of the album before it came out.
The new album is more guitar-rock sounding than previous albums.
KELLEY: Definitely for “Ballerina.” As we’ve grown as a band, we’ve gotten more and more feeling like wanting to record the live rock band sound. When we first started, our recordings would start very minimally and then we would build them up. It often started with just vocals and then we would add little guitar parts and build it up slowly. But the sound felt a lot more delicate most of the time. And then, as we’ve been growing and recording and playing live and playing big shows, it definitely has influenced our sound and what we want to hear back when we record our new music. So I think “Ballerina” especially feels heavier. There’s a lot of different genre leanings on the record. Some songs are delicate, and some are in a totally different space. We recorded all live band basic tracks first and then built on top of that.
MINA: We came in with pretty fleshed out demos that we recorded with our band ahead of time. Then, before we went into the studio with (producer) Catherine (Marks), she came early, we hung out in our drummer’s basement and played through all the songs live as a band. We were workshopping the songs with Catherine. There were definitely some songs that sounded completely different after workshopping. Catherine was very focused on making sure the drum pattern was right, making sure the tempo was right, but we definitely flipped a lot of songs on their heads. She still saw our vision of wanting all the songs to be playable live and have them sound the same way live as they are recorded. That felt really good. The core of the songs were not made piecemeal. It wasn’t like the drummer went in and did their part, the bassist went in and did their part, the guitarist went in and did their part. We all went into the live room and played the song all together. We wanted the songs to have a big, but not super polished, sound. And, we wanted pretty raw-sounding vocals. We talked to Catherine a year before making the record on the phone. We all had the same ideas about it. We sent her the demos and we talked about it. We told her we wanted to build worlds with these songs and have the live band and the harmonies and the vocals be at the center.
When you’re in the studio, there’s a lot you can do that maybe you can’t do live. You can add instruments, you can add extra tracks to the mix. But, if you do that, you can’t perform the song live exactly the way it was recorded. It sounds to me like you recorded songs that you know you can pull off live?
KELLEY: Definitely, There’s something to pairing songs down live when the recording is giant sounding. I also think it’s interesting to play songs differently live. We have the idea that we’re going to play songs as the version of us that we are today. Sometimes those versions are amazing, even though they don’t sound like the recording. There have been songs where we have really interesting sounds that we can’t bring with us. In lieu of adding tracks to a stage performance, I think we would just play the song differently. There are backwards cellos and stuff on songs that I miss live.
MINA: We’re never married to the recording. Recording the album, we definitely layered a bunch of stuff that we knew we wouldn’t be able to play live unless we put it in a track. But, over the years of touring, there are songs that we used to play with tracks that, now, we’re like, let’s rearrange it and figure out how it feels live and what feels the most fun and human to play even if it doesn’t have all of the filling, we figure out how to fill it in different ways.
My favorite thing is going to a show and watching the band do their thing live. I don’t care if it sounds exactly like the recording. I just love seeing people make music in front of me. So, I think that’s something that we try to do when we’re touring.
I really love the “pretty people party proudly / Posing, posting, perfect peers” tongue twister in “Ballerina.” Do you spend a lot of time on lyrics or does something like that just come together quickly?
KELLEY: We spend a lot of time on lyrics, but I think most of the time it does just kind of come out, that bridge specifically. Once you’re on the train of writing, it kind of happens within 2 minutes most of the time. For me, generally the song either takes 20 minutes or one part takes 10 minutes and then I’ll wait a year for the next part. Then I’ll be like, “It’s finally done.” Once you’re writing, you can kind of feel what needs to happen. I really do feel like songs just show up most of the time.
MINA: It doesn’t always feel you’re writing the lyrics, it feels like there’s a spirit visiting you. Kelley and I write most of the songs together and we’ve developed such a good flow with writing. We’ll usually start with a seed and then figure out what the idea is, what the song is about, and then we’ll start to mold it. The part of “Ballerina” that you’re talking about is interesting because we wrote the song, except for the bridge, very quickly. I think I wrote the beginning of that song. Then, I made a little demo of just that and sent it to Kelley. I was like, “I think we should make this song, it sounds really good to me.” Then she came over and we wrote the rest of the song except for the bridge. We were like, “Maybe there doesn’t need to be a bridge. Maybe it’s an instrumental thing.” Kelley left my house after a whole day of writing and then she immediately called me 10 minutes later and was like, “I have the bridge. It’s ‘pretty people party.’”
A lot of the time, the bridge of the song is where we admit the point of the song. It’s where the song is distilled. It’s where we say the thing that we’re scared to say. So, a lot of the time we write the bridge last, after we understand what the song is about. For a lot of our songs, we don’t fully understand the song until we’re finished writing it and then we can add the bridge in.
KELLEY: I love a wordy bridge. I love a wordy verse in general, but I think the bridge also feels like a time when you can just say a bunch of stuff like, “I think the song is about this. If it wasn’t me and I got through these verses and chorus, would I fully get it? Or is there like one more thing that I have to say before it’s really clarifying?” For “Ballerina,” that bridge feels clarifying and it feels like information that you actually need in order to get the whole song. I love doing that. We did that also with “I’m Fine,” a much older song of ours. It’s super wordy and is also tongue twisting.
MINA: It’s kind of Dorky. It’s awesome.
There’s a part in “Dream Song” that I absolutely love. I don’t know if it’s considered a bridge or a chorus or what, but it’s the part where you sing, “When I walk / through the mall / I’m so tall / Everybody loves me.” It’s this super cool breakdown.
MINA: I think it’s just a hook. That song we wanted to not have a traditional structure. I think that part is surprising when it shows up and it’s supposed to help shift the scene. “Dream Song” and “Swinging” are our most visual songs. For “Dream Song,” we wanted the listener to follow a character that was falling into a big mouth water thing and then they appear in a mall, and everybody’s crying and laughing and kissing. And then, suddenly, they’re extremely tall and walking through the mall. We wanted the scenes to change with the music.
”Lady Exhausted” is another song that feels like it changes throughout the song. Dreams and birds come up in a number of songs. Is that intentional?
KELLEY: I would say using the word “dreams” in lyrics was intentional. We were talking a lot about dreams. But there are other things on the record that are a through line throughout a bunch of different songs that were less intentional. There’s a few songs that talk about falling into a huge mouth. It’s like, why are we saying that? (laughs) There’s birds. There’s mouths. There’s dreams. Some of those are lyrics Mina wrote alone, some are lyrics I wrote alone that share language and I think it’s because we’re all very steeped in this album vibe. We were on the same page writing it and we’re interested in similar ideas. I really like noticing those things because it’s accidental sometimes.
MINA: The interesting thing about birds is that I wrote both of the bird ones. I saw bird bones in the road and it reminded me of a friend who passed away who was very into taxidermy. The other bird part is in the song “Everywhere” because I always see these birds. There are always doves outside my window. I’m always thinking, “Can I have one?” I wonder if it’s the same dove that comes to my window or different doves. Is it living there?
I never really noticed birds that much when I was younger. Two-and-a-half years ago, I went on this trip to Portugal alone after having a pretty difficult moment with my brain. I needed to recenter and be alone. So I went on this 10-day trip and I tried to make it a goal to just observe things. I felt very connected to birds because I felt like I saw my cat in all the birds faces. My cat is a very bird-like cat. I was seeing so much personality in the birds and they were very confrontational, even more than in New York. I would be sitting and eating something and a bird would come and eat my sandwich. But, I think I started slowly developing a connection to birds when we started writing this album.
When you’re not writing, recording or touring, what are some of your favorite things to do?
KELLEY: I love to hang out with my friends and my mom. I love going on really long walks, and I like going to classes. I like learning a lot, so I feel like when we have time off I try to take a dance class or something. During the pandemic, I picked up some random hobbies of things that I’m not good at, and I think before that time I generally did mostly things that I was already good at. I also love going on a little drive somewhere. That’s something my mom and I used to do. It’s like, have a day off? Go drive somewhere random.
MINA: I’m super crafty. I just learned to sew, so I’ve been making a lot of clothes. I learned to crochet. I’m a big reader. I love reading a lot about magical realism. I also like autobiographies. I read so many different things. I love things that keep me creative, like monkey brain busy. I think I get really sad if I spend too much time on my phone which I’m addicted to, unfortunately.
I don’t think you sound exactly like Veruca Salt but the way you sing together reminds me of Nina and Louise. Do the two of you have common influences?
MINA: I think the first person we really bonded over was Fiona Apple. I think that was an early influence for both of us in terms of songwriting. She has a very specific voice and a very emotive voice, and I think that listening to her, her lyrics really come across. There’s some songs where you really have to focus, to listen to the lyrics. I think that we really were inspired by that, and her unexpected melodic shifts and very visual lyrics. She was a big influence for both of us. Overall, we are inspired by people who don’t sound like anybody else and who have a very iconic spirit that, if you hear it come on, you know that it couldn’t be anybody else. We have a lot of different influences too, the people that we currently listen, we listen to different stuff. At the core of it, our childhood and teenage selves are inspired by the same things, but our modern selves are inspired by different things that we bring together.
Are there any songs or artists that, when you listen, take you back to a very specific time or place in your life?
KELLEY: There are so many songs that come to mind when you’re saying that, but one of them is “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying,” by Belle and Sebastian. I listened to it in college this one semester, where we went to the same college, and we were in the same acting school, but for one semester I did a different acting school. I was doing a production of Salome, and I was doing a bunch of extracurricular stuff, and I was really busy. and I listened to that song constantly. Now, when I hear it, I feel like I’m in that building. And I also feel like I have school and I have homework. I love that song and I can’t fully enjoy it in the same way because it feels like the last semester of college and I’m freaking out.
MINA: I grew up in New Orleans, and a couple of years before Katrina I had this house in uptown New Orleans. I moved there when I was 9 years old, and, for the first time, I had a bedroom. The house had kind of a half floor that was the bottom floor because there’s no basements in New Orleans because it’s below sea level. So I basically had a floor to myself that was just my room and the garage. I felt like a kid in a movie. I had my little armoire pink thing, and a little backyard outside. It felt like whatever freedom feels like to a 9-year-old. I remember I had a little Walkman, and I would listen to my favorite song, which was “Beautiful Soul,” by Jesse McCartney. I have such a vivid memory of it. Every time I hear it, I’m jumping on my bed and dancing to that song, singing it out loud like I’m a pop star. I had a big crush on him, too. After a couple of years, that room completely flooded. That is like a very fond memory, a very special room that only existed for a little bit of time.
